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THE FUTURE OF NATO

HEARINGBEFORE THE

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS

UNITED STATES SENATE

ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

MAY 1, 2002

Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Relations

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Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/senate

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COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS

JOSEPH R. BIDEN, JR., Delaware, ChairmanPAUL S. SARBANES, MarylandCHRISTOPHER J. DODD, ConnecticutJOHN F. KERRY, MassachusettsRUSSELL D. FEINGOLD, WisconsinPAUL D. WELLSTONE, MinnesotaBARBARA BOXER, CaliforniaROBERT G. TORRICELLI, New JerseyBILL NELSON, FloridaJOHN D. ROCKEFELLER IV, West Virginia

JESSE HELMS, North CarolinaRICHARD G. LUGAR, IndianaCHUCK HAGEL, NebraskaGORDON H. SMITH, OregonBILL FRIST, TennesseeLINCOLN D. CHAFEE, Rhode IslandGEORGE ALLEN, VirginiaSAM BROWNBACK, KansasMICHAEL B. ENZI, Wyoming

ANTONY J. BLINKEN, Staff DirectorPATRICIA A. MCNERNEY, Republican Staff Director

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C O N T E N T S

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Biden, Hon. Joseph R., Jr., U.S. Senator from Delaware, prepared statement . 4Clark, Gen. Wesley K., U.S. Army (Ret.), former Supreme Allied Commander

Europe, The Stephens Group, Washington, DC ................................................ 43Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 47

Enzi, Hon. Michael B., U.S. Senator from Wyoming, prepared statement ......... 9Feingold, Hon. Russell D., U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, prepared statement .. 6Feith, Hon. Douglas, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Department

of Defense, Washington, DC ................................................................................ 22Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 26Responses to additional questions for the record from Senator Gordon

Smith .............................................................................................................. 72Grossman, Hon Marc, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Depart-

ment of State, Washington, DC .......................................................................... 12Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 18Responses to additional questions for the record from Senator Gordon

Smith .............................................................................................................. 70Helms, Hon. Jesse, U.S. Senator from North Carolina, prepared statement ..... 7Lugar Hon. Richard G., U.S. Senator from Indiana, prepared statement .......... 7Odom, Lt. Gen. William E., U.S. Army (Ret.), former Director, National

Security Agency, Yale University and The Hudson Institute, Washington,DC .......................................................................................................................... 49

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 51

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THE FUTURE OF NATO

WEDNESDAY, MAY 1, 2002

U.S. SENATE,COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS,

Washington, DC.The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:14 a.m., in room

SD–419, Dirksen Senate Office Building, the Hon. Joseph R. Biden(chairman of the committee), presiding.

Present: Senators Biden, Bill Nelson, Lugar, Hagel, GordonSmith, Allen, Brownback and Enzi.

The CHAIRMAN. Ladies and gentlemen, I welcome you to thehearing. I do not know what Bertie told you, but I would listen tohim, because he controls the place.

All kidding aside, the hearing will come to order.It is a pleasure to welcome you to the Foreign Relations Com-

mittee for what I believe to be is an important hearing. This morn-ing, we are going to examine the future of an institution that un-derstandably has taken a back seat in capturing our attention inthe last several months.

But no one should doubt that NATO, the North Atlantic TreatyOrganization, remains absolutely critical to the security of theUnited States, in my opinion.

For more than half a century, NATO has been the cornerstoneof our strategic defense. It is our most important tangible link toEurope. It demonstrates the continuing commitment of the UnitedStates, and the continuing commitment of the United States tobeing a European power.

Despite September 11 and all that it implies about a new secu-rity environment, I would submit that the circumstances I justmentioned have not changed.

Without a stable Europe, we cannot hope to carry out our ambi-tious goals elsewhere in the world. And without the active coopera-tion of vibrant, loyal European partners, we cannot succeed in ourmultifaceted war on terrorism. Nonetheless, the war on terrorismdoes require a reexamination of our rationale for NATO and howit should adapt to meeting these new challenges.

This is a particularly opportune moment to conduct a reexamina-tion. In little more than 6 months, the Alliance will hold a momen-tous summit in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic. And thePrague summit will deal with three interrelated issues.

The first is the fundamental questions of NATO’s scope and pur-pose. Second is the new relationship between NATO and Russia.And third is the next round of NATO enlargement.


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It is no secret that many of our European allies have begun toquestion the depth of America’s commitment to NATO. On the dayafter the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Alliance for the first time inits 52-year history invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treatyof 1949. I know the witnesses know this language well, but we thepublic hears us talk about the invocation of Article 5 and how mo-mentous that was, and how significant it was, but I want to readthe language: ‘‘The Parties agree,’’ I am quoting, ‘‘that an armedattack against one or more of them in Europe or North Americashall be considered an attack against them all, and consequentlythey agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them . .. will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith,individually, and in concert with other Parties, such action as itdeems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore andmaintain the security of the North Atlantic area.’’

As I said that day on the floor of the U.S. Senate, invoking Arti-cle 5 was a big deal, a very big deal. It was the ultimate gestureof solidarity with us by our European and Canadian allies.

And how did we react? I would submit that is a matter of debateas to whether we reacted in the way that was appropriate.

It is true that European NATO allies have piloted AWACSplanes flying along the east coast of the United States in order tofree up American crews for combat in Afghanistan. It is also truethat special forces units of the United Kingdom and other alliesalongside American forces have recently engaged units of al-Qaedaand the Taliban. Some allied aircraft have flown close air supportfor U.S. troops.

But all in all, and one must raise the question, our NATO allieshave until now played a peripheral role in the Afghan campaign.Maybe the Pentagon was correct in its apparent judgment that thewar would go smoother if prosecuted in this manner because of thewell-known capabilities gap between our allies and ourselves.

Whatever the accuracy of that assessment, NATO allies inevi-tably in my view, have concluded, A, that the United States dem-onstrated unmistakable, overwhelming domination of the war inAfghanistan; B, we have conveyed a strong impression that in fu-ture conflicts the United States will do the war fighting; and C,given our war-fighting capability, we choose to leave the other par-ticipants to start the international peacekeeping force in Afghani-stan; and, D, the Europeans will be expected to clean up after theparade.

My trip to Afghanistan in January convinced me that we mustbecome actively involved in the International Security AfghanForce [ISAF]. The International Security Afghan Force, in order tobring security and stability to all parts of that country as quicklyas possible, in my view, has to be enlarged.

Our allies have already stepped up to the plate, two of them inleadership roles. The U.K. currently leads ISAF; and Turkey hasagreed to take over the command for 6 months beginning later thisspring.

Does their example argue for NATO, through peacekeeping, to bethe key player in strategically important countries outside of Eu-rope? With regard to the capabilities gap, should NATO put to-


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gether a quick start capabilities package, as suggested by formerAssistant Secretary of Defense, Frank Kramer?

Such an effort would enhance Alliance interoperability and en-able European NATO expeditionary forces rapidly to become oper-ational.

The complexity of the Afghan situation raises questions. How ex-tensively outside the North Atlantic area should NATO be in-volved? Before answering that question, we must look at the newchallenges to our security. How much relative weight should NATOgive to missions that until now have been peripheral? For example,what institutional role might NATO have in the struggles againstterrorism, international crime, and the proliferation of weapons ofmass destruction?

More fundamentally, what if there is no common threat percep-tion within the Alliance? Most obviously, there is no unanimityabout Saddam Hussein and whether or not he constitutes a clearand present danger to the United States and Europe. In that case,does NATO defer to a ‘‘new coalition of the willing,’’ led by theUnited States? Is that the likely model for future campaigns out-side of Europe?

Our witnesses today will have no shortage of ‘‘big picture’’ topicsto discuss.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased that President Bush is car-rying on important work begun by the last administration of bring-ing new members into NATO and reaching out to Russia. Sep-tember 11 has created historic opportunities to continue the proc-ess of reconciliation with Russia. And if we get it right, we can re-verse the titanic rivalry that dominated the second half of the 20thcentury.

President Putin, as I have said on numerous occasions, has casthis country’s lot with the West with a determination not seen sincePeter the Great. We should assist him in every way consistent withour national security interests.

Domestically, that means helping democratic civil society in Rus-sia flourish. It means helping genuine rule of law take root. Itmeans cementing rights for all segments of society, including safe-guarding of the rights of religious groups.

We must also broaden our security cooperation with Russia. Atthe Reykjavik NATO Ministerial meeting later this month, a newNATO-Russian Council will be launched.

I would be very interested in hearing from our two distinguishedadministration witnesses exactly how that body will be structuredand what issues it will have within its purview.

My own feeling is that, at the outset, the council should empha-size areas where there is already a meeting of the minds betweenNATO and Russia. The struggle against international terrorism isthe most obvious example.

I would prefer to see the council not include peacekeeping oper-ations in its initial catalog of responsibilities, since Russia was rel-atively actively opposed to NATO’s last two peacekeeping oper-ations in Bosnia and Kosovo, before eventually deciding to jointhem.


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Despite the considerable suspicion and mistrust to overcome, Iam optimistic that the new relationship between NATO and Russiacan be mutually beneficial.

And I will ask unanimous consent that the remainder of mystatement be put in the record.

[The prepared statement of Senator Biden follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF SENATOR JOSEPH R. BIDEN, JR.

‘‘THE FUTURE OF NATO: PREPARING FOR THE PRAGUE SUMMIT’’

It’s a pleasure to welcome you to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee forwhat I believe is a very important hearing.

This morning we will examine the future of an institution that understandablyhas taken a back-seat in capturing our attention for the last several months. Butno one should doubt that NATO—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—remainsabsolutely critical to the security of the United States.

For more than a half-century, NATO has been the cornerstone of our strategic de-fense. It is our most important tangible link to Europe. And it demonstrates the con-tinuing commitment of the United States to being a European power.

Despite September 11th and all that it implies about a new security environment,I would submit that the circumstances I just mentioned have not changed.

Without a stable Europe, we cannot hope to carry out our ambitious goals else-where in the world.

Without the active cooperation of vibrant, loyal European partners, we cannot suc-ceed in our multi-faceted war on terrorism.

Nonetheless, the war on terrorism does require a re-examination of the rationalefor NATO—and how it should adapt to meet new challenges.

This is a particularly opportune moment to conduct a re-examination. In littlemore than six months, the Alliance will hold a momentous summit in Prague, thecapital of the Czech Republic.

The Prague summit will deal with three great inter-related issues.The first is the fundamental question of NATO’s scope and purpose.Second is the new relationship between NATO and Russia.And, third, is the next round of NATO enlargement.It’s no secret that many of our European allies have begun to question the depth

of America’s commitment to NATO.On the day after the terrorist attacks of September 11, the Alliance, for the first

time in its then 52 year history invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty of1949 whereby:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them inEurope or North America shall be considered an attack against them all,and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each ofthem. . . . will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith,individually, and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deemsnecessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the se-curity of the North Atlantic area . . .

As I said that day on the floor of the United States Senate, the invoking of Article5 was a big deal—a very big deal. It was the ultimate gesture of solidarity with usby our European and Canadian allies.

How did we react? I would submit that it’s a matter of debate as to whether wereacted in a way that was appropriate.

It is true that European NATO allies have piloted AWACS planes flying along theEast Coast of the United States in order to free up American crews for combat inAfghanistan.

It is also true that Special Forces units of the United Kingdom and other allies,alongside American forces, have recently engaged units of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.Some allied aircraft have flown close air support for U.S. troops.

But, all in all, one must come to the conclusion that our NATO allies have untilnow played a peripheral role in the Afghan campaign. Maybe the Pentagon was cor-rect in its apparent judgment that the war would go smoother if prosecuted in thismanner because of the well-known ‘‘capabilities gap’’ between our allies and our-selves.

Whatever the accuracy of that assessment, NATO allies inevitably have concludedthat:


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(a) The United States demonstrated unmistakable, overwhelming dominationof the Afghan war.

(b) We have conveyed the strong impression that in future conflicts theUnited States will do the war fighting.

(c) Given our war-fighting capability, we choose to leave to others participa-tion in the international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan.

(d) The Europeans will be expected to clean up after the parade.My trip to Afghanistan in January convinced me that we must become actively

involved in ISAF—the International Security Assistance Force—in order to bring se-curity and stability to all parts of the country as quickly as possible.

Our allies have already stepped up to the plate—two of them in leadership roles.The U.K. currently leads ISAF, and Turkey has agreed to take over command forsix months, beginning later this spring.

Does their example argue for NATO, through peacekeeping, to be a key player instrategically important countries outside of Europe?

With regard to the ‘‘capabilities gap,’’ should NATO put together a ‘‘quick-start’’capabilities package, as suggested by former Assistant Secretary of Defense FrankKramer?

Such an effort would enhance Alliance inter-operability and enable a EuropeanNATO Expeditionary Force rapidly to become operational.

The complexity of the Afghan situation raises the question of how extensively out-side of the North Atlantic area NATO should be involved.

Before answering, we must look at the new challenges to our security. How muchrelative weight should NATO give to missions that, until now, have been periph-eral? For example, what institutional role might NATO have in the strugglesagainst terrorism, international crime, and the proliferation of weapons of mass de-struction?

More fundamentally, what if there is no common threat perception within the Al-liance? Most obviously, there’s no unanimity about whether Saddam Hussein con-stitutes a clear and present danger to the United States and Europe.

In that case, does NATO defer to a new ‘‘coalition of the willing’’ led by the U.S.?Is that the likely model for future campaigns outside of Europe?

Our witnesses today will have no shortage of ‘‘big picture’’ topics to discuss.Ladies and Gentlemen, I am pleased that President Bush is carrying on the im-

portant work begun by the Clinton administration of bringing new members intoNATO and reaching out to Russia.

September 11 has created historic opportunities to continue the process of rec-onciliation with Russia. If we get it right, we can reverse the titanic rivalry thatdominated the second half of the 20th century.

President Putin, as I have said on numerous occasions, has cast his country’s lotwith the West with a determination not seen since Peter the Great.

We should assist him in every way consistent with our own security interests.Domestically, that means helping a democratic civil society flourish in Russia. It

means helping genuine rule of law take root. It means cementing rights for all seg-ments of society, including safeguarding the rights of all religious groups.

We must also broaden our security cooperation with Russia. At the ReykjavikNATO Ministerial meetings later this month, a new NATO-Russia Council will belaunched.

I would be very interested in hearing from our two distinguished administrationwitnesses how that body will be structured and what issues it will have in its pur-view.

My own feeling is that, at the outset, the Council should emphasize areas wherethere is already a meeting of the minds between NATO and Russia. The struggleagainst international terrorism is the most obvious example.

I would prefer to see the Council not include peacekeeping operations in its initialcatalogue of responsibilities, since Russia actively opposed NATO’s last two peace-keeping operations in Bosnia and Kosovo, before eventually deciding to join.

Despite the considerable suspicion and mistrust to overcome, I am optimistic thatthe new relationship between NATO and Russia can be mutually beneficial.

The third major issue for Prague is NATO enlargement.Four years ago, I had the privilege of being the floor manager for the Resolution

of Ratification that gave Senate approval to the accession to NATO of Poland, Hun-gary, and the Czech Republic. Since then, all three countries have proven them-selves to be dependable allies.

The most persuasive argument for NATO enlargement remains as valid today asit was in 1998: extending the zone of stability eastward in Europe. Through the


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well-conceived program of Membership Action Plans, many more aspirant countriesare on the brink of being invited to join the Alliance.

By this summer it will be time to ‘‘name names’’—to openly declare exactly whichcountries should be invited.

On many occasions I have said that Slovenia has been ready for several years.Recently the three Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have madegreat strides toward qualifying. Slovakia has made similar progress, and if it electsa democratic government in October, it should be a strong candidate.

In the last few months, support for a so-called ‘‘Southern Dimension’’ has beengaining momentum.

Both Romania and Bulgaria are working hard to meet the NATO norms. Theircase is strengthened both by their strategic geographic location, and by their exem-plary support for the anti-terrorism campaign since September 11.

Aside from meeting the military criteria, all the aspirant countries must dem-onstrate to NATO that they truly are members of an Alliance of shared democraticvalues. In particular, ugly remnants of war-time fascism must be totally—and per-manently—suppressed.

Whatever the final number of invited countries, the process of NATO enlargementwill continue to strengthen the Alliance and to move the Continent toward the goalof a ‘‘Europe whole and free.’’

Ladies and gentlemen, to discuss these and other issues this morning we have atruly outstanding group of witnesses.

Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman is a long-timefriend. I didn’t say ‘‘old friend’’ because Marc certainly doesn’t fit that description.He is the State Department’s Wunderkind.

He served as our Ambassador to Turkey shortly after leaving high school—andthat’s only a slight exaggeration. He now occupies the senior career post in the De-partment.

Doug Feith is Under Secretary for Policy at the Department of Defense. He cameto the Pentagon from a distinguished career in the private sector and has alreadymade his mark as a keen analyst and effective spokesman for the Department.

General Wes Clark, of course, capped a long, star-studded career in the U.S. Armyas Supreme Allied Commander Europe, where he successfully prosecuted the Yugo-slav air war. Most recently he has become a best-selling author. I have long turnedto him for incisive advice, and he has never disappointed me.

Lieutenant General Bill Odom also served in the U.S. Army with great distinc-tion. An internationally recognized strategist, he did a tour as Director of the Na-tional Security Agency. He is now affiliated with Yale University and the HudsonInstitute.

Gentlemen, we are grateful to all of you for agreeing to appear before this com-mittee.

[The following statement was submitted by Senator Feingold forinclusion the record:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF SENATOR RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD

Mr. Chairman, thank you for calling this important hearing. I think we are alleager to consider how to move forward at this crucial moment in building stronger,larger and ultimately more effective structures within NATO. And I am particularlygrateful for this opportunity to consider specific issues related to the next round ofNATO expansion, along with the establishment of a dynamic new NATO-Russiapartnership.

As we begin the first of many such dialogues on these topics, I think we mustfirst pause to consider the larger policy objectives that should guide future effortsto transform what is clearly the most crucial of our security alliances. We must askhow robust of an expansion we can support, while simultaneously maintaining mili-tary preparedness, preserving the close security relationships of existing memberstates, and securing a long-term but cost-effective investment in our own nationaldefense.

Many of the candidate states have made exceptional progress in meeting the re-quired standards for future NATO membership. I wish to congratulate all of thecandidates on their progress. But now we must ask careful questions about how fareach state has come in meeting those obligations. We must also consider the addi-tional regional security advantages and potential economies of scale that could begained by inviting a larger slate of candidates to join the alliance at the same time.

This is a security alliance, and our own national security interests must guidethese decisions. But at the same time we must give careful consideration to the like-


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ly effect of NATO membership within each candidate state, as our long-term objec-tive must be to create secure democratic allies with effective military capacities thatare willing to participate actively in the alliance. Some states could benefit tremen-dously from early membership, even if their membership could be premature by cer-tain development standards. Other states could also find it difficult and ultimatelyunproductive to struggle to meet difficult membership standards prematurely. Thesewill be difficult decisions that must be made on a case-by-case basis. I look forwardto beginning these considerations here today.

[The following statement was submitted by Senator Helms for in-clusion the record:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF SENATOR JESSE HELMS

Thank you Mr. Chairman for holding this significant hearing today. You did soat my request and I am grateful to you for doing so. During the previous debateover enlargement of the NATO Alliance, the Senate Foreign Relations Committeeheld a total of nine hearings on the issue of NATO enlargement. I am pleased thatwe are starting the process again today for what I expect will be a robust enlarge-ment of our Alliance at the Prague summit in November.

In January of 2001 in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, I said, ‘‘per-haps the greatest moral challenge we face at the dawn of a new century is to rightthe wrongs perpetrated in the last century at Yalta, when the West abandoned thenations of Central and Eastern Europe to Stalin and a life of servitude behind theIron Curtain.’’

When the Senate voted to admit Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic intoNATO in 1998 we began the process of righting that wrong. Senate ratification ofthe protocols to enlarge NATO and ensure that the new members would secure theirrightful place in the community of Western democracies was one of my proudestachievements as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

However, the first round of NATO enlargement into the new democracies of Cen-tral Europe did not fully erase the scars of Yalta. During the cold war, many of usin the Senate fought to defend the independence of what came to be known as the‘‘captive nations’’—the Baltic countries of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. This sec-ond and historic enlargement of the NATO Alliance into Eastern and Central Eu-rope will, I hope, bring the Baltic nations squarely into the transatlantic alliance.

Last June in a stirring speech in Warsaw, President Bush said that there wouldbe ‘‘no more Yaltas’’ and committed ‘‘NATO membership for all of Europe’s democ-racies that seek it and are ready to share the responsibility.’’ Senate bill 1572, TheFreedom Consolidation Act, which I introduced with Senator Lieberman and numer-ous other cosponsors, endorses the President’s vison. I hope that it will be enactedbefore he travels to Europe later this month.

[The prepared statement of Senator Lugar follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF SENATOR DICK LUGAR

NATO ENLARGEMENT AND NATO’S FUTURE

Mr. Chairman, you are to be commended for calling this hearing and for assem-bling two panels of very fine witnesses.

Government deliberations as well as public debate are beginning to heat up onthe NATO issue as Alliance members contemplate the run-up to the NATO summitin Prague this November.

When I refer to the NATO issue, I refer not only to the enlargement question orto the efforts to establish a new Russia-NATO relationship. I also refer to the ques-tion of NATO’s purpose, of its transformation and its ability and willingness toadapt its roles, its missions and its capabilities to the post-September 11 world andto the war on terrorism in particular.

I would suggest for purposes of our hearing today that, on some NATO-relatedissues, there is considerable common ground in Congress, within the administration,and with Allies. But there also remain some rather weighty issues concerning theAlliance on which efforts at consensus remain difficult.NATO Enlargement, NATO-Russia

I sense that there is a common view on two key issues. First, there is generalagreement that NATO enlargement should continue, that we should think about anambitious round for Prague, and that the war on terrorism makes it all the moreimportant to accelerate the task of consolidation democracy and security in Central


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and Eastern Europe. The recent V–10 Bucharest summit has given added impetusto the prospect of including Bulgaria and Romania as possible candidates at Pragueas part of a new ‘‘southern dimension.’’ Thus, we are now considering a secondround of candidates that could include seven countries—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,Slovakia, Slovema, Bulgaria, and Romania.

Second, there would appear to be something of a common view that the UnitedStates and NATO are also moving forward constructively on the NATO-Russiatrack. Reassurances provided by administration officials have answered many of theconcerns that had been raised about the new NATO-Russia Council. While we awaitthe outcome of the Ministerial in Iceland later this month, I believe it is fair to saythat the administration’s approach has been a constructive one that is consistentwith the provisions of the Senate resolution of ratification regarding the NATO-Rus-sia Pennanent Joint Council.NATO’s Purpose, NATO’s Future

The third issue where there is less agreement and where the thinking of the ad-ministration as well as Alliance officials is also less developed, has to do withNATO’s future missions and capabilities. What do we want NATO to do in the fu-ture? I believe that this issue will and should be a central issue at the Prague sum-mit.

The ongoing pace of military operations in Afghanistan and the escalating vio-lence in the Middle East serve to underscore the simple fact that the greatest secu-rity challenges of our day no longer lie within Europe but outside of it. As a result,the trans-Atlantic relationship faces a paradox. We have the most successful Alli-ance ever created but it is or seems to be marginal or even irrelevant when it comesto dealing with the most urgent issues of the day.

And the fact that NATO—ostensibly America’s premiere alliance and the linchpinof the trans-Atlantic relationship—appears to be completely absent in our strategyon these critical issues raises important questions about this institution’s futurecentrality and vitality.

It also seems to me that the issue for NATO is also pretty simple if far-reaching:Should NATO remain focused on managing security in an already fairly stable Eu-ropean Continent? Or should it now seek to expand its missions beyond Europe inorder to deal with the new threats? And should this issue be part of the agendafor the Prague summit in November of this year?

Addressing this challenge is the strategic issue of our time. It is as daunting asdealing with the USSR was in its day. September 11 can and, in my view, shouldlead to a renaissance of trans-Atlantic cooperation around this new agenda. If itdoes not, if NATO remains focused on Europe, the Alliance will be reduced to whatmight be called the ‘‘housekeeping’’ function of managing security on an already sta-ble continent. It will cease to be America’s premier alliance for the simple reasonthat it will not be addressing the major security issue of our time. And if we stopinvesting in it, we can hardly expect the European allies to invest in it either.

On a more basic level, we must address a strategic disconnect. We have the mostdeveloped Alliance to deal with those strategic issues that are largely resolved andreceding in importance and urgency, yet no alliance to deal with the most importantand more deadly and immediate threats to our nations. That is hardly a recipe fora sound strategy or a healthy alliance!

The problem we face in NATO today is not just one of capabilities but of purpose.The two are inextricably linked. One cannot be solved without addressing the other.And our answer cannot be limited to the technocratic issue if devising a more effec-tive successor to the Defense Capabilities Initiative (DCI). A DCI–2 that focuses onspecialization and special forces might be helpful but it no substitute for a commonstrategy that addresses the key strategic challenge for our time and harnesses U.S.and European will and purpose. Formulation of and fidelity to that common purposeis a fundamental prerequisite for generating the resources to create new capabili-ties, not the other way around.

The issue of what NATO is for, its basic purpose, is already part of the publicdebate. It will inevitably be an issue for the Prague summit—especially if eventsin the Middle East or Iraq make it a central issue in European-American relationsthis fall. Thus, the question is whether the United States will lead in embracingthis kind of reform agenda or not. If U.S. policy wants to produce a strategic shiftof this magnitude, then, in my view, there will never be a better opportunity forthe Bush administration to initiate that process than the Prague summit.

I look forward to hearing from Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, MarcGrossman, and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Doug Feith, on the adminis-tration’s efforts in these important areas. Our second panel is also very qualifiedto speak on these subjects, General Wes Clark, has led the Alliance in combat and


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General Odom has been a longtime commentator and student of NATO and thetrans-Atlantic relationship.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and I look forward to our witnesses testimony.

[The following statement was submitted by Senator Enzi for in-clusion the record:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF SENATOR MICHAEL B. ENZI

Mr. Chairman, thank you for calling this hearing to look at the future of NATO.As we all know, NATO, as an organization, has been one of the strongest supportersof the United States following the attacks of September 11. The historical landmarkof having NATO invoke Article 5 of the mutual defense policy was a good exampleof how NATO is supposed to work. The support from those nations currently beingconsidered for NATO membership also showed how effective this alliance is and cancontinue to be. The aspiring nations, along with our NATO allies, provided theUnited States with permission to use their air space and many have sent their owntroops to Afghanistan. We have also seen many of these countries take immediateaction to address terrorism and the financing of terrorism within their own borders.As the United States continues to fight terrorism internationally, I believe we canbe proud that so many nations stand with us.

I am pleased that the Bush administration has endorsed robust enlargement ofthe NATO Alliance. I personally have had the opportunity to meet with representa-tives of many of the aspiring countries. In these meetings, I have seen evidence ofprogress and strong desires to continue to have improved economies and stable gov-ernments. So much progress has been made in each of the countries over the last10 years that each nation should be commended. As the President has stated re-peatedly about the Prague summit in November, ‘‘We should not calculate how littlewe can get away with, but how much we can do to advance the cause of freedom.’’I believe the President is correct. NATO is a defense alliance of nations who wantto protect the freedom of their people and the freedom of their allies. The summitin Prague is an opportunity not just for aspiring countries to join the alliance, butfor the world to see the continued advancement of freedom and democracy.

I believe NATO enlargement should continue to be a focus and a priority of theUnited States. I was pleased when Senator Helms led the effort in the Senate onthe Freedom Consolidation Act and that this committee approved the Act last year.The Freedom Consolidation Act is an important statement that the Congress of theUnited States supports the President and supports NATO enlargement. The Act in-cludes statements from both President Bush and President Clinton and has strongsupport from both parties. I hope the Senate will be able to take up this Act forconsideration as soon as possible.

In this hearing we are not only examining NATO enlargement, but more gen-erally, the future of the Alliance. One area where we can see the future of NATOchanging almost immediately is in the relationship between Russia and NATO.While there will be many issues that the new NATO-Russia Council will not be ableto address or reach consensus on, the Council can provide a good forum for an im-proved NATO-Russia dialog. I believe one of the most important ways to improverelations with Russia, on any issue, is through communication. The Council hasgreat possibilities and should go forward with support from the United States. Crit-ics must be assured that the Council does not give Russia a ‘‘back door’’ into NATO.The Council gives both NATO and Russia the opportunity to take actions togetherbut does not threaten the Alliance. I believe the Council is a constructive tool thatcan improve international security.

As we look at improving the relationship between the Alliance and Russia, I be-lieve it is important to see other areas in need of improvement. NATO has beencriticized for taking actions that go beyond the original mandate. This is simply nottrue. NATO continues to be a strong alliance with an important mandate of pro-viding defense and security for its members. We saw the evidence that this remainstrue after September 11. The organization of NATO, however, should be examinedby its members to determine how it can be made better. Improvement can andshould be made in how the organization operates. I believe it is our responsibilityto ask the questions: Is NATO operating efficiently, is NATO responding timely andappropriately to international crisis, and what can be done to improve NATO oper-ations? These questions must be addressed by the United States and our delegatesshould have proposals to take to the organization.

Mr. Chairman, I am impressed with the witnesses prepared to testify before thiscommittee. Experience is a learning tool that cannot be reproduced, but it can beshared. Today’s witnesses have the experience and knowledge that will make this


10

hearing a productive discussion on NATO’s future. I look forward to hearing the tes-timony of both panels. Thank you again, Mr. Chairman, for holding this importanthearing.

The CHAIRMAN. And by way of closing, I am suggesting that ofthe two witnesses whom I will introduce later, Under Secretary ofState for Political Affairs Marc Grossman is a long-time friend. Idid not say ‘‘old friend,’’ because Marc certainly does not fit thatdescription.

Mr. GROSSMAN. Yes.The CHAIRMAN. Marc served as Ambassador to Turkey shortly

after leaving high school. That is only a slight exaggeration. Henow occupies a senior career post in the Department.

And Doug Feith is Under Secretary for Policy at the Departmentof Defense. He came to the Pentagon from a distinguished careerin the private sector and has already made his mark as a keen an-alyst and effective spokesman for the Department.

We are also going to hear from others; I will introduce themlater. Well, I might as well do it now, so I do not have to do it later.General Wes Clark, of course, capped a long, star-studded careerin the U.S. Army by serving as Supreme Allied Commander of Eu-rope, where he successfully prosecuted the Yugoslav air war. Mostrecently, he has become a best-selling author. And I have longturned to him for advice, as have many of us up here on this panel.And he has never disappointed me, or I suspect, anyone on thepanel.

Lieutenant General Bill Odom also served in the U.S. Army withgreat distinction. An internationally recognized strategist, he did atour as Director of the National Security Agency, and he is now af-filiated with Yale University and the Hudson Institute.

We have a very, very distinguished group of Americans before ustoday and I am anxious to, after I turn to my friend from Indiana,to get to hear what they have to say and be able to question them.

Senator Lugar.Senator LUGAR. Mr. Chairman, thank you for calling this hear-

ing, for assembling two panels of excellent witnesses.Government deliberations, as well as public debate, are begin-

ning to focus on the NATO issue, as Alliance members contemplatethe runup to the NATO summit in Prague this November.

When I refer to the NATO issue, I refer not only to the enlarge-ment question, or to the efforts to establish a new Russian-NATOrelationship, I also refer to the question of NATO’s purpose, of itstransformation, its ability and willingness to adopt its roles, itsmission, its capabilities to the post-September 11 world and to thewar on terrorism in particular.

I would suggest for purposes of our hearing today that on someNATO-related issues there is considerable common ground in Con-gress, within the administration and with our allies. But there alsoremains some weighty issues concerning the Alliance, on which ef-forts at consensus remain difficult.

I sense there is a common view on two key issues. First thereis general agreement that NATO enlargement should continue,that we should think about an ambitious round for Prague andthat the war on terrorism makes it all the more important to accel-


11

erate the task of consolidating democracy and security in Centraland Eastern Europe.

The recent V–10 Bucharest summit has given added impetus tothe prospect of including Bulgaria and Romania as possible can-didates at Prague, as part of a new southern dimension. Thus weare now considering a second round of candidates that includeseven countries, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia,Bulgaria and Romania.

Second, there would appear to be a common view that the UnitedStates and NATO are moving forward constructively on the NATO-Russia track. Reassurances provided by administration officialshave answered many of the concerns that have been raised aboutthe new NATO-Russia Council.

While we await the outcome of the Ministerial in Iceland laterthis month, I believe that the administration’s approach has beena constructive one that is consistent with the provisions of the Sen-ate resolutions of ratification regarding NATO-Russian PermanentJoint Council.

The third issue, where there is less agreement and where thethinking of the administration as well as Alliance officials, is alsoless developed, has to do with NATO’s future missions and capa-bilities. What do we want NATO to do in the future?

I believe that this issue will and should be a central issue at thePrague summit. The ongoing pace of military operations in Afghan-istan, the escalating violence in the Middle East serve to under-score the simple fact that the greatest security challenges of ourday no longer lie within Europe, but outside of it.

As a result, the transatlantic relationship faces a paradox. Wehave the most successful Alliance ever created, but it is or seemsto be marginal or even irrelevant when it comes to dealing with themost urgent issues of the day.

And the fact that NATO, ostensibly America’s premiere allianceand the linchpin of the transatlantic relationship, sometimes ap-pears to be absent in our strategy on these critical issues raises im-portant questions about NATO’s future centrality and vitality.

It also seems to me that the issue for NATO is also simple if far-reaching. Should NATO remain focused on managing security in analready fairly stable European continent, or should it now seek toexpand its mission beyond Europe in order to deal with the newthreats? And should this issue be a part of the agenda for thePrague summit in November of this year?

Addressing this challenge is the strategic issue of our time. It isas daunting as dealing with the USSR was in its day.

September 11 can and, in my view, should lead to a renaissanceof transatlantic cooperation around this new agenda. If it does not,if NATO remains focused on Europe, the Alliance will be reducedto what might be called the housekeeping function of managing se-curity in an already stable continent. And it will cease to be Amer-ica’s premiere alliance for the simple reason that it will not be ad-dressing the major security issues of our time. And if we stop in-vesting in it, we can hardly expect European allies to invest in iteither.

On a more basic level, we must address strategic disconnect. Wehave the most developed alliance to deal with those strategic issues


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that are largely resolved and receding in importance and urgency,yet no alliance to deal with the most important and more deadlyand immediate threats to our nations, United States and Euro-pean.

That is hardly a recipe for a sound strategy or a healthy alliance.The problem we face in NATO today is not just one of capabilities,but of purpose. The two are inextricably linked, and one cannot besolved without addressing the other.

And our answer cannot be limited to the technocratic issue of de-vising a more effective successor to the Defense Capabilities Initia-tive, the DCI. A DCI–2, that focuses on specialization and specialforces might be helpful, but is no substitute for a common strategythat addresses the key strategic challenge for our time and har-nesses U.S. and European will and purpose. Formulation of and fi-delity to that common purpose is a fundamental prerequisite forgenerating the resources to create new capabilities and not theother way around.

The issue of what NATO is for, its basic purpose, is already partof the public debate, and it will be an issue for the Prague summit,especially if events in the Middle East or Iraq make it a centralissue in the European-American relations this fall. Thus the ques-tion is whether the United States will lead in embracing this kindof reform agenda or not. If U.S. policy wants to produce a strategicshift of this magnitude, then in my view, there will never be a bet-ter opportunity for the Bush administration to initiate that processthan the Prague summit.

I will look forward to hearing from Under Secretary of State forPolitical Affairs Marc Grossman, and Under Secretary of Defensefor Policy Doug Feith, on the administration’s efforts in these im-portant areas.

Our second panel is exceptionally well qualified to speak on thesesubjects. General Wes Clark has led the Alliance in combat, andGeneral Bill Odom has been a long-time commentator and studentof NATO and the transatlantic relationship.

I thank you, Mr. Chairman, for this hearing. I look forward tothe testimony of our witnesses.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much, Senator.Under Secretary Grossman.

STATEMENT OF HON. MARC GROSSMAN, UNDER SECRETARYOF STATE FOR POLITICAL AFFAIRS, DEPARTMENT OFSTATE, WASHINGTON, DC

Mr. GROSSMAN. Yes, Mr. Chairman. Thank you very much. Firstof all, Mr. Chairman, Senator Lugar, other members of the com-mittee. I thank you very much for this opportunity to testify today.It is always an honor and a privilege to be here.

Mr. Chairman, with your permission, I would like to submit alonger statement for the record, and if you might just allow me tomake——

The CHAIRMAN. Without objection, the whole statement will beplaced in the record.

Mr. GROSSMAN. If you would allow me to make some comments,I would very much appreciate it to start this conversation.


13

First of all, before I do anything else, let me thank you and allof the members of the committee and, indeed, Members of the Sen-ate for all the consultation and the time and the effort that youhave taken with us, not just over the past few months, but overthe past few years as we try to get NATO right.

Those are in formal sessions and informal sessions and we havealways very much benefited from your advice and from your wis-dom. And we know that as we go forward, especially on the issuesof capabilities and relationships and this relationship with Russia,we will need to be in the closest possible consultation with the Sen-ate. And we very much look forward to that.

Mr. Chairman, as you both said, the conversation about NATOand ‘‘What is NATO’s purpose? What is NATO all about? Is NATOrelevant to the future?’’ is now on—in our publics, in our par-liaments and in our administration. And I have got to say I wel-come this debate. This is not something that I shrink from at all.And I do not think the administration shrinks from it at all, be-cause we ought to be talking about the future of NATO, and weought to be considering new relationships and new partners andnew members for NATO. And that seems to me what democrat-ically supported foreign and defense policy is all about.

As you said, Mr. Chairman, and also Senator Lugar, the attackson the 11th of September and NATO’s response, which as SenatorBiden said was a big deal, proved to me that NATO’s continuingvalue in the world, in this world of new and unpredictable threats,to me, as to Senator Biden, invoking Article 5 for the very firsttime in NATO’s history sent a clear message that this is an Alli-ance that is united and is very much determined.

We very much, all of us, ought to very much welcome NATO’scollective response as well as the contributions of individual allies.From our perspective, these 50 years of people working together inNATO made it possible for allied forces to work together in Oper-ation Enduring Freedom.

Take first the collective response. As Senator Biden noted, NATOAWACS have logged over 3,000 hours patrolling American skies.NATO standing naval forces are working with U.S. naval forces inthe eastern Mediterranean.

All of the NATO allies have provided blanket overflight rights,access to ports and bases, refueling assistance, and stepped up in-telligence efforts. Sixteen of the 19 allies are supporting OperationsEnduring Freedom and Noble Eagle with military forces and withmilitary capabilities. Fourteen of our 19 allies have deployed forcesin the region, and 9 are actually participating in combat operationsin Afghanistan.

So we believe that what the NATO allies have done is made asignificant contribution both collectively and individually to Oper-ation Enduring Freedom.

As Senator Biden pointed out, almost all of our allies are also in-volved in the International Security and Assistance Force in Af-ghanistan. Current allies, aspiring allies are all there to be part ofthe effort to bring Afghanistan into the modern world. NATO, tome, still matters.

Senator Lugar talked a little bit about the question of the visionof NATO. Where do we want to take this Alliance? I think when


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President Bush and his counterparts meet in Prague later thisyear, their gathering will symbolize the changes that have takenplace in Europe and NATO’s central role in making these changespossible.

Think about Prague: Prague, a city that was once behind theIron Curtain; Prague, a city that was once synonymous in a famousspring in 1968 with the rebellion against the system that we de-feated. And in 1991, Prague was the city in which the Warsaw Pactwas dissolved. So it seems, to me anyway, that it is a perfect placeto think about the future of this Alliance.

NATO remains a fundamental pillar of our foreign and defensepolicy. As President Bush said last month when NATO SecretaryGeneral Robertson was here, ‘‘NATO remains an anchor of securityfor both Europe and the United States.’’

As you both know, Senators, I have just returned from a meetingwith all of our NATO allies in Brussels and then I went on to 8individual allies to consult on our agenda for Prague, our vision ofthe future. And we proposed that Prague be defined by threethemes: First, new capabilities; second, new members; and third,new relationships.

And Mr. Chairman, with your permission, I would just like tosay a word about each of these categories.

First, September 11 brought home to every single person in thisroom and certainly in the United States, and I believe to each oneof our allies, how dangerous our world still is, as you both noted.

Czech President Havel, who will host the Prague summit, ob-served that September 11, and these are his words, ‘‘alerted us tothe evil existing in this world.’’

September 11 also demonstrated how important it is that wehave allies if we are to defend our way of life and if we are to de-fend our democracy.

So to me, NATO is no less important to our security today. In-deed, it is possible that NATO is more important to our securitytoday. And so as I report to you, our agenda for Prague has threeparts. First, ensuring that NATO has the capabilities needed tomeet emerging new threats; second, to extend NATO membershipto more new European democracies; and third, to renew NATO’spartnerships and relationships with Russia and the Ukraine andother partners. It is new capabilities, new members, and new rela-tionships.

It seems, to me anyway, that these three themes are very muchrooted in NATO’s values and goals as set out in the 1949 treaty.The chairman read from that treaty.

I also took a look, since we are 53 years almost exactly from thetreaty being signed, at what President Truman had to say on April4, 1949 about this NATO treaty. And I think it goes very muchalong with what the chairman said.

This is what Truman said in announcing this treaty, ‘‘It is alto-gether appropriate that nations so deeply conscious of their com-mon interests should join in expressing their determination to pre-serve their present peaceful situation and protect it in the future.And with our common traditions, we face common problems.’’

He did not talk about one problem. He did not talk about one ge-ography. He did not talk about one set of issues. But in Truman’s


15

speech, he talked about the need to defend common values, com-mon traditions and our common security.

Since the end of the cold war, Mr. Chairman, the Alliance hastaken steps to revise its doctrine and improve its command andforce structures to meet today’s threats. The 1999 strategic concept,which all of us worked so hard on, defined those new threats ex-plicitly, noting that the new risk to the Euro-Atlantic peace andstability were becoming clearer: oppression, ethnic conflict, the pro-liferation of weapons of mass destruction and the global spread ofweapons technology and terrorism.

I think it is clear that while we have recognized these newthreats, there has to be lots more done at NATO to meet them. Inorder to defend ourselves against these new threats, NATO needsto be able to deploy at short notice flexible, well armed forces capa-ble of conducting sustained military operations across a range ofoptions.

And while the United States now possesses these kinds of forces,in large measure our European allies do not. And I believe thatthis growing capabilities gap between Europe and the UnitedStates is the most serious long-term problem facing NATO. It mustbe addressed.

And I would say to Senator Lugar that I think there is consensuson this; there is consensus that Europeans need to do more to closethis capabilities gap. In order to fight effectively alongside theUnited States, our European allies need more flexible, sustainableforces able to move long distances quickly and deliver over-whelming firepower on arrival. This will mean that they need toinvest in airlift, and in sealift, precision strike capabilities and theability to communicate with the rest of us at the fight.

In our view, at Prague, NATO must begin to address these issuesand must begin to take serious steps to improve overall Alliance ca-pabilities. Under Secretary Feith will have more to say on this. Iwould like—as I have said, I have more on mine that is part of therecord, but this is a very, very important issue.

The CHAIRMAN. Do not short-circuit your comments on thatissue, I mean, do not worry about the time.

Mr. GROSSMAN. OK.The CHAIRMAN. This is the central issue for most of us sitting up

here.Mr. GROSSMAN. It is a central issue. I will just make one more

comment since both of you raised it.What I said at NATO the other day to all of our allies sitting

around the table was, ‘‘If we get to a point where it is the truththat the United States fights and NATO cleans up or the UnitedStates fights and the European Union cleans up, that is bad for usand it is very, very bad for our European allies.’’

So I just could not agree with both of you more and, as I say,the Under Secretary will say more about the precise parts of thesecapabilities. But I believe that if we work ourselves into this posi-tion where there is this division of labor, we will all have done our-selves—we will have done ourselves a considerable amount of dam-age, not just to the United States, but certainly to the Europeansas well.


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I will talk for a minute about new members, Mr. Chairman. Oursecond goal for Prague is to continue the process of building aunited Euro-Atlantic community, by extending membership tothose democratic European countries who have demonstrated theirdetermination and their ability to defend the principles of democ-racy, individual liberty and the rule of law.

As the President observed last year in Warsaw, ‘‘Yalta did notratify a natural divide. It divided a living civilization.’’

And I believe that a fair review of the enlargement to Europe’snew democracies in 1997, which this committee so successfully sup-ported, has brought us closer to completing the vision of NATO’sfounders of a free and united Europe. But our work on this is notyet done.

In his first meeting with allies last June, President Bush secureda consensus to take concrete, historic decisions in Prague to ad-vance enlargement. And we take as our guidance the President’sview that NATO ‘‘should not calculate how little we can get awaywith, but how much we can do to advance the cause of freedom.’’

We have been working very hard with the aspirant countries andwith other allies so that people are ready for NATO membership.

You all know that a team led by U.S. Ambassador to NATO NickBurns completed a tour of all 9 of the aspirant countries focusingon the need for reform. We have told aspirants that the UnitedStates has made no decision on which countries to support formembership, and we have urged them all to accelerate their re-forms between now and Prague.

Members of this committee, Members of the Senate, members ofthe public, I think will rightly ask: ‘‘What capabilities, what con-tributions will these aspirant countries bring to the Alliance if theyare allowed to join our treaty?’’

Well, the Washington treaty makes clear that states invited tojoin NATO should be in a position to further the principles of thetreaty and contribute to the security of the Euro-Atlantic area.Many aspirants have already demonstrated their determination todo just this.

The Vilnius Group, which met in Sofia last October declared itsshared intention, and I quote here from their statement, to ‘‘fullysupport the war against the terrorism’’ and to ‘‘act as Allies of theUnited States of America.’’ And when Deputy Secretary Armitagewas in Bucharest not 3 weeks ago, this commitment was verymuch reaffirmed.

Aspirants have offered overflight rights, transit and basing privi-leges, military and police forces, medical units and transportationsupport to U.S. efforts. Most of them will participate in the Inter-national Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. And most aspi-rant countries have contributed already to our efforts in the Bal-kans.

Some people have said that after September 11, enlargementshould not remain a priority. I think that is wrong. I believe thatenlargement should remain a priority for this Alliance because, asyou said, Senator Lugar and Senator Biden, the events of Sep-tember 11 show us that the more allies we have, the better off weare going to be. The more allies we have to prosecute the war onterrorism the better off we are going to be.


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And if we are going to meet these new threats to our security,we need to build the broadest and strongest coalition possible ofcountries that share our values and are able to act effectively withus. With freedom under attack, we must demonstrate our resolveto do as much as we can to advance our cause.

It is our goal and it is also our expectation that, working withyou, we will be able to forge a solid and united approach to en-largement and to build an equally strong consensus within the Alli-ance.

I might say, if I could take this opportunity also, that we verymuch appreciate the support that members of this committee havegiven to the Freedom Consolidation Act, and we hope that the solidbipartisan support for this act might help it pass in the very nearfuture. We look forward to the closest possible consultations withthe Congress, and especially the Senate, as we go forward on thequestions of enlargement.

Finally, Mr. Chairman, a word or two about new relationships.And I appreciate what Senator Lugar said, that there seems to bea consensus on the fact that we need to have the right new rela-tionship with Russia, but I also appreciate the point that youmade, Mr. Chairman, that we have got to get it right and weshould not leave doubts and anxieties on either side about whatthis relationship is to be about.

Our goal for Prague is to advance this NATO core principle,which is that NATO ought to live in peace with all peoples and pro-mote stability in the Euro-Atlantic area. NATO-Russia have takenimportant steps to give new emphasis and direction to their exten-sive cooperation in the aftermath of September 11.

And as you both said, NATO is now working with Russia to com-plete negotiations on the creation of a new body to be called theNATO-Russia Council that will permit joint decisions and actionsin areas of common interests. At the upcoming Reykjavik Ministe-rial, we are optimistic that Secretary of State Powell will be ableto conclude with his colleagues the agreement on this new struc-ture.

And then to acknowledge the potential significance of the new re-lationship, President Bush and other NATO leaders have been in-vited to a summit on the 28th of May in Rome to celebrate the newNATO-Russia Council.

Mr. Chairman, let me answer your question as directly as I can.From our perspective, here is what this new NATO-Russia Councilwill do: First, it will focus on practical, well-defined projects, whereNATO and Russia share a common purpose and a common goal.Second, it will offer Russia the opportunity to participate in shap-ing the development of cooperative mechanisms in areas such ascounterterrorism, nonproliferation, and civil emergency prepared-ness.

Very importantly as well, here is what the NATO-Russia Councilwill not do: The body will not give Russia the ability to veto anyNATO actions in any area. Second, it is not a back door to NATOmembership. Third, the NATO-Russia Council will not infringe onNATO’s prerogatives.

NATO members will continue to take any decision by consensuson any issue. And the NATO-Russia Council will be fully separate


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from the North Atlantic Council, which will continue to meet andmake decisions as it always has on the full range of issues onNATO’s agenda.

Mr. Chairman, while forging these new links with Russia, wealso need to pay attention to countries like Ukraine, to the coun-tries we are working with in Central Asia. And very importantlyfrom my trip to the region, we want to pay attention to what iscalled NATO’s Mediterranean dialog as well.

Mr. Chairman, nearly 53 years after its creation, NATO remainsthe core of the United States commitment to Europe and the bed-rock of our security. A Europe whole and free and at peace is a goalfast becoming a reality thanks to NATO.

As we look to Prague and to our agenda for new capabilities, newmembers and new relationships, we look forward to working closelywith members of this committee to ensure that NATO will meet to-morrow’s challenges as successfully as it met those of the past. Ithank you very much.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Marc.[The prepared statement of Mr. Grossman follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF HON. MARC GROSSMAN, UNDER SECRETARY OF STATE FORPOLITICAL AFFAIRS

Senator Biden, Senator Lugar, Members of the Committee, it is an honor and aprivilege to be here. I thank you for the opportunity to address the Senate ForeignRelations Committee with my friend and colleague, Doug Feith.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to begin by thanking you and other members of thisCommittee and the Senate for your strong and consistent support for NATO, whichhas helped ensure it remains the greatest Alliance in history.

It has been a privilege and my good fortune to have had the opportunity to con-sult with you and take your advice over the years on NATO. I look forward to con-tinuing this dialogue and consultation in the future.

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate your invitation today at a time when the future ofNATO is being actively discussed on both sides of the Atlantic.

I welcome this debate. Our governments, our parliaments and our publics oughtto talk about the future of NATO. That is what democratically supported foreignand defense policy is all about.

The attacks of September 11 and NATO’s response prove to me NATO’s con-tinuing value in a world of new and unpredictable threats. Invoking Article 5 forthe first time in history, NATO sent a clear message that the Alliance is united anddetermined.

We greatly value NATO’s collective response, as well as the contributions of indi-vidual Allies. Fifty years of NATO cooperation made natural the participation of Al-lied forces in Operation Enduring Freedom. NATO AWACS have logged over 3,000hours patrolling American skies. All NATO Allies have provided blanket overflightrights, access to ports and bases, refueling assistance, and stepped up intelligenceefforts. Sixteen of our Allies are supporting Operations Enduring Freedom andNoble Eagle with military forces and capabilities. Fourteen Allies have deployedforces in the region, and nine are participating in combat operations with us in east-ern Afghanistan as we speak.

Almost all contributors to the International Security Assistance Force, initially ledby Britain and soon by Turkey, are current Allies, aspiring Allies, or countries whohave trained with NATO in the Partnership for Peace. Their varied contributionsinclude air reconnaissance, refueling, cargo, and close air support missions, specialforces missions, specialized nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons units, mineclearing and medical units, and naval patrols. Altogether Allies and Partners havedeployed nearly 4,000 troops to Afghanistan.

NATO’s actions in response to September 11 come as no surprise to me. Through-out its history, NATO has adapted to meet new threats and seize new opportunities.

Nothing illustrates this fact better than the number of countries seeking to join.Secretary Powell made this point last week, observing that countries want to join‘‘because they want to be a part of a political and security organization that is an-chored in its relationship with North America.’’


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NATO TODAY: ENDURING VALUES AND COMMON PURPOSES

When President Bush and his counterparts meet in Prague later this year, theirgathering will symbolize the changes that have taken place in Europe and NATO’scentral role in making these changes possible.

Prague: Once behind an Iron Curtain.Prague: Synonymous in a famous spring in 1968 with rebellion against oppression

and thirst for democracy. And in 1991, Prague hosted the meeting that dissolvedthe Warsaw Pact.

In 2002, NATO leaders will come to Prague to continue shaping that new Europeand to reaffirm the strength, unity and vitality of the Atlantic Alliance.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization remains a fundamental pillar of our for-eign and defense policy. As President Bush said last month, NATO remains ‘‘an an-chor of security for both Europe and the United States.’’

I have just returned from meeting with all of our Allies at NATO. I then traveledto eight Allied capitals to consult on our agenda for Prague.

We proposed that Prague be defined by three themes: New Capabilities, NewMembers, and New Relationships.

21ST CENTURY NATO: NEW CAPABILITIES, NEW MEMBERS, NEW RELATIONSHIPS

September 11 has brought home to us how dangerous our world has become.Czech President Vaclav Havel, who will host the Prague summit, observed that Sep-tember 11 ‘‘alerted us to the evil existing in this world.’’ September 11 has also dem-onstrated how important our Allies are in helping to defeat the new threats thatface us. To protect our way of life, the Alliance must be an effective tool in the worldafter September 11.

That is why NATO ministers agreed last December to intensify common effortsto meet the threats from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction that all Alliesface. When President Bush meets with Allied leaders in Prague later this year, weexpect that Allies will approve an action plan aimed at enhancing NATO’s abilityto deal with these and other threats.

NATO is not less important to our security today, NATO is more important.Our agenda at Prague will be threefold:• Ensuring NATO has the capabilities needed to meet emerging new threats,• Extending NATO membership to more new European democracies, and• Renewing NATO relationsships with Russia, Ukraine and other Partners.New capabilities. New members. New relationships.This agenda is rooted in NATO’s values and goals as set out in the 1949 Wash-

ington Treaty—to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of ourpeoples, live in peace with all peoples and governments, and promote the stabilityand well-being of the North Atlantic area.

NEW CAPABILITIES

Since the end of the Cold War, the Alliance has taken steps to revise its doctrineand improve its command and force structures to meet today’s threats. The 1999Strategic Concept defined these new threats explicitly, noting that ‘‘new risks toEuro-Atlantic peace and stability were becoming clearer—oppression, ethnic conflict,the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the global spread of weaponstechnology and terrorism.’’

While we have recognized the new threats, we have more to do to prepare NATOto meet them. The September 11 terrorist attacks demonstrated that the threats toAllies and to our Alliance can come from anywhere, at any time, employing devicesranging from a box cutter to weapons of mass destruction. In order to defend our-selves against these new threats, NATO needs to be able to deploy at short noticeflexible, well-armed forces capable of conducting sustained operations across a rangeof military options.

While the U.S. currently possesses forces with such capabilities, in large measureour European Allies do not. I believe the growing capabilities gap between theUnited States and Europe is the most serious long-term problem facing NATO andmust be addressed. In order to fight effectively alongside the U.S., our European Al-lies need flexible, sustainable forces, able to move long distances quickly and deliveroverwhelming firepower on arrival. This will require improved strategic lift andmodern precision strike capabilities, as well as enhanced combat support and com-bat service support. Unless the disparity is substantially narrowed, NATO will beincreasingly less able to play its part in countering the threats that now face us.


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At Prague, NATO must begin to redress this imbalance by agreeing to stepsaimed at improving overall Alliance capabilities. These will include further stream-lining NATO’s command structure to make it more responsive to today’s threats anda commitment to provide the deployable, capable and ready forces NATO needs.

We are seeking a comprehensive improvement in European military capabilities.Although the DCI initiative identified many areas where improvements were need-ed, much remains to be done to fulfill its goals. We need to sharpen and narrowour focus. Increased defense spending remains an important goal, and we believeAlllies can also use resources more effectively by greater pooling of their efforts.Among the proposals we would favor is creation of a European Mobility Commandto coordinate existing and future European airlift assets.

Afghanistan has also demonstrated the importance of Special Operations forces incombined land-air operations. To enhance NATO capabilities in this area we willalso propose creation of a Special Operations Coordination Center at SHAPE.

NATO must also develop the means to defend its forces and members againstweapons of mass destruction fielded either by rogue states or terrorist groups or bysome combination of the two. Here we have proposed initiatives on biological weap-ons defense and bio-terrorism and will soon offer proposals on missile defense.

NEW MEMBERS

Our second goal for Prague is to continue the process of building a united Euro-Atlantic community by extending membership to those democratic European coun-tries who have demonstrated their determination and ability to defend the prin-ciples of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law.

As the President observed last year in Warsaw, ‘‘Yalta did not ratify a naturaldivide, it divided a living civilization.’’ He made it clear that his goal is to erase thefalse lines that have divided Europe and to ‘‘welcome into Europe’s home’’ every Eu-ropean nation that struggles toward democracy, free markets, and a strong civic cul-ture.

The process of enlargement to Europe’s new democracies launched in 1997 hasfulfilled NATO’s promise and brought us closer to completing the vision of NATO’sfounders of a free and united Europe. But our work is not done.

In his first meeting with Allies last June, the President secured a consensus totake concrete, historic decisions at Prague to advance enlargement. We take as guid-ance the President’s view that NATO ‘‘should not calculate how little we can getaway with, but how much we can do to advance the cause of freedom.’’

We have been working with Allies and the nine current aspirant countries tostrengthen their preparations. A team led by U.S. Ambassador to NATO Nick Burnsvisited the aspirant countries earlier this year to reinforce the importance of ad-dressing key reform priorities in the months before Prague. Our team came awayfrom its meetings impressed by the commitment of the aspirants to meeting theirMembership Action Plan goals and advancing reforms, even while recognizing thatthey all have serious work ahead to prepare for membership. We have told aspirantsthat the U.S. has made no decision on which countries to support for membership,and we have urged them to accelerate their reforms between now and Prague.

Members of this Committee and the rest of the Senate will rightly ask what capa-bilities and contributions potential new members will bring to the Alliance.

The Washington Treaty makes clear that states invited to join NATO should bein a position to further the principles of the Treaty and contribute to the securityof the Euro-Atlantic area. This is the standard that we and our Allies will applyas we approach decisions at Prague. Many aspirants have already demonstratedtheir determination to contribute to Euro-Atlantic security and stability. The VilniusGroup, meeting in Sofia last October declared its shared intention to ‘‘fully supportthe war against terrorism’’ and to ‘‘act as Allies of the United States.’’ Aspirantshave offered overflight rights, transit and basing privileges, military and policeforces, medical units and transport support to U.S. efforts. Most will participate inthe International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. Most aspirant countrieshave also contributed actively to NATO efforts to prevent further hostilities in theBalkans.

Some have asked in the aftermath of September 11 whether enlargement shouldremain a priority. I believe the answer is ‘‘yes.’’ The events of September 11 havereinforced the importance of closer cooperation and integration between the UnitedStates and all the democracies of Europe. If we are to meet new threats to our secu-rity, we need to build the broadest and strongest coalition possible of countries thatshare our values and are able to act effectively with us. With freedom under attack,we must demonstrate our resolve to do as much as we can to advance its cause.


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It is our goal and expectation that, working with you, we will be able to forge asolid and united approach to enlargement and build an equally strong consensuswith the Alliance.

We welcome the support from members of this Committee for the Freedom Con-solidation Support Act, and believe that a solid bipartisan majority behind this billwill send a message of our commitment to an enlarged and strengthened Alliance.

We look forward to the closest consultations with the Congress on this subject andto the debate in the Senate on ratification as we approach these historic decisions.

Our third goal for Prague is also aimed at advancing NATO’s core principles—those of living in peace with all peoples and promoting stability in the Euro-Atlanticarea. As we work to complete the vision of a united Europe from which, WinstonChurchill once observed, ‘‘no nation should be permanently outcast,’’ we must con-tinue to reach out and expand cooperation and integration with all of NATO’s Part-ners.

NATO and Russia have taken steps to give new impetus and direction to theirextensive cooperation in the aftermath of September 11. President Bush’s vision isof a Russia ‘‘fully reformed, fully democratic, and closely bound to the rest of Eu-rope,’’ which is able to build partnerships with Europe’s great institutions, includingNATO.

NATO is now working with Russia to complete negotiations on creation of a newbody—the NATO-Russia Council—that will permit joint decisions and actions inareas of common interest. At the upcoming Reykjavik ministerial, we are optimisticthat Secretary Powell will conclude with his colleagues the agreement on the newstructure. To acknowledge the potential significance of the new relationship, Presi-dent Bush will join NATO and Russian leaders at a summit May 28 in Italy to inau-gurate the NATO-Russia Council.

Here’s what the proposed NATO-Russia Council will do:• It will focus on practical, well-defined projects where NATO and Russia share

a common purpose and a common goal.• It will offer Russia the opportunity to participate in shaping the development

of cooperative mechanisms in areas such as counter-terrorism, nonproliferation,and civil emergency preparedness.

Here is what the NATO-Russia Council will not do:• The new body will not give Russia the ability to veto NATO actions in any

areas.• It is not a back door to NATO membership.• It will not infringe on NATO prerogatives. NATO members will continue to take

any decision by consensus on any issue.The NATO-Russia Council will be fully separate from the NAC, which will con-

tinue to meet and make decisions as it always has on the full range of issues onNATO’s agenda.

While forging new links with Russia, our cooperative vision for NATO embracesall of NATO’s Partners, including Ukraine, countries in the Caucasus and CentralAsia, and Mediterranean Dialogue partners.

Our Distinctive Partnership with Ukraine has helped ensure that Ukraine con-tinues to progress along the reform path and expand its links to the West. Ukrainehas signaled its desire for closer integration with NATO. NATO has made clear toUkraine the need for greater substantive progress in a number of areas. At Prague,we should welcome Ukraine’s interest while looking to develop initiatives aimed atconcrete results in strategic areas of common interest.

We want to focus at Prague on NATO’s Partner activities with countries of Cen-tral Asia that have played such constructive roles in the war against terrorism. ThePartnership for Peace and EAPC have been successful vehicles for integration, butwe believe that much more can be done to expand cooperation between NATO andthese countries. Through the PfP, NATO can help build reformed, stable, democraticsocieties in Central Asia and the Caucasus. We need to make sure PfP programsand resources are tailored to their needs, so that they can develop the forces andtraining they need to meet common threats and strengthen stability.

Nearly fifty-three years after its creation, NATO remains the core of the UnitedStates commitment to Europe and the bedrock of our security. NATO has kept peacein Europe for over half a century, it continues to provide for Allies conventional andnuclear defense, and it is the nexus of cooperation with Russia, Ukraine, CentralAsia and the Caucasus. No other organization can fulfill these roles.

A Europe whole, free and at peace is a goal fast becoming a reality thanks toNATO. We and our Allies have much work ahead, but also an historic opportunityto achieve our goals of defending, integrating, and stabilizing the Euro-Atlantic area


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and continuing to strengthen this greatest of Alliances. As we look to Prague andour agenda of new capabilities, new members, and new relationships, we look for-ward to working closely with members of this Committee to ensure that NATO willmeet tomorrow’s challenges as successfully as it has those of the past.

The CHAIRMAN. Secretary Feith.

STATEMENT OF HON. DOUGLAS J. FEITH, UNDER SECRETARYOF DEFENSE FOR POLICY, DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE,WASHINGTON, DC

Mr. FEITH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.Mr. Chairman, Senator Lugar, members of the committee, I

would like first to echo Secretary Grossman’s comment about theusefulness of the consultation that we in the administration havehad with members of this committee and other Members of theSenate.

We have been impressed by the degree of interest in NATO. Itis useful to us to learn your perspectives and it is gratifying to seethat there is the kind of support, bipartisan support for NATO thatremains very strong today despite all—no, I would not even say‘‘despite.’’ I would say largely because of all the questions that peo-ple continually raise about NATO’s relevance to the current world.

Chairman Biden began his remarks by reading from the NorthAtlantic Treaty. He quoted from Article 5. I would like to quote ashort passage from the preamble of the 1949 treaty. It said, ‘‘Theparties are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritageand civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of de-mocracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law. They seek to pro-mote stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area.’’

NATO achieved these purposes during the cold war, and sincethen it has fulfilled them in the Balkans through its peacekeepingwork in Bosnia and in the war against ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.

NATO has adapted itself to play an important role now in sup-porting the U.S.-led war on terrorism. And in the future, an ex-panding list of NATO members will continue to promote Euro-At-lantic stability. The Alliance will continue to safeguard the commu-nity of North Atlantic democracies against all types of threats, in-cluding, I suppose, threats that we cannot now anticipate.

Since 1949, we have had a broad and bipartisan support forNATO as an element of U.S. national security policy. I take thisas a sign that the phrase ‘‘Atlantic community’’ is meaningful.

The United States and its European and Canadian allies indeedare a community. We are not just a collection of members of a mul-tinational forum. We share fundamental beliefs, for example aboutthe nature of human beings, their rights and their relationship totheir respective governments. And the security of the community’sdifferent elements is of a piece.

Among the Atlantic community’s members there are common in-terests, large common interests, economic and political, as well asmilitary. And there is true fellow feeling that motivates action.

For an alliance of this kind to remain vital for over 50 years,there must be more than a treaty underlying it. There must be sen-timent, a sense of community, that makes the Alliance richer thana simple legal obligation. And this point, I think, was illustratedin the response of NATO and NATO members to the attack on the


23

United States on September 11. Our allies responded to the attackquickly, loyally and usefully.

Less than 24 hours after the World Trade Center and Pentagonwere hit, the Alliance for the first time in history, as ChairmanBiden noted, invoked Article 5, the collective defense provision ofthe NATO treaty. And since last fall, as has been commented on,we have 7 NATO AWACS aircraft patrolling U.S. skies.

The war effort and the post-Taliban reconstruction and securityeffort in Afghanistan are benefiting from the contributions of ourNATO allies and partners. Those contributions have come fromwithin and outside the formal Alliance structures. All, as SecretaryGrossman stressed, are the result of more than 50 years of jointplanning, training, and operations within NATO.

The contributions have entailed great sacrifice. America is notthe only NATO ally to have lost soldiers in Operation EnduringFreedom. The forces of our Canadian and European allies have alsosuffered losses, as have other Enduring Freedom coalition states.

In speaking to the NATO Defense Ministers last June, SecretaryRumsfeld listed terrorism first among the new threats facing theAlliance. The other threats he mentioned were cyber attack, high-tech conventional weapons and ballistic and cruise missiles armedwith weapons of mass destruction.

Members of this committee also recognize these new threats. AsSenator Lugar pointed out in a recent speech, ‘‘The terrorist at-tacks on the United States of last September have graphically dem-onstrated how vulnerable we are. And when I say ‘we,’ I mean theWest in general, including Europe. The next attack could just aseasily be in London, Paris, or Berlin as in Washington, Los Angelesor New York. And it could involve weapons of mass destruction.’’

NATO’s core mission remains the collective defense of its mem-bers, as stated in Article 5. But there is room and need for changein how NATO fulfills its responsibility to protect the Alliance’s in-terests and promote its principles. NATO will need to transformitself to handle new threats and serve its other purposes.

The Prague summit will be an important event and as SecretaryGrossman said, it is going to stress the themes of new capabilities,new members and new relationships.

The military forces of the Alliance are the essence of the Alli-ance’s essential function, common defense. But I agree with Sec-retary Grossman that the notorious capabilities gap between theUnited States and its European and Canadian allies continues togrow, and if the divergence is not reversed, it will impede the al-lies’ ability to operate with U.S. forces in the future and will ulti-mately weaken the Alliance’s political cohesion.

So our first goal at Prague must be to remedy the capabilities de-ficiencies within the Alliance. We will work to secure the commit-ment of allied leaders to specific measures and definite timelinesto fix shortfalls in four top priority areas. And I would like to re-view these top priority areas:

First, nuclear, biological, and chemical defenses to protect alliedforces and missile defenses to protect Alliance forces, territory andpopulation centers against the range of missile threats; second,platforms and support capabilities to transport Alliance forces rap-idly to wherever they are needed and to supply them until their


24

mission is completed; third, communication and information sys-tems that will connect Alliance forces securely before and duringcombat and peace enforcement operations; and, fourth, modernweapons systems, such as all-weather precision guided munitions,jamming systems and capabilities to suppress enemy air defensesthat will enable allies to make first tier contributions to combat op-erations.

To achieve these goals, we believe allies should seek both to in-crease defense spending and to use their resources more effectivelyby pooling efforts.

At Prague, the United States will also seek agreements tostreamline NATO’s command force structures. As you know, theUnited States is changing its own Unified Command Plan. Like-wise, NATO should ensure that its command and force structuresare reorganized for 21st century missions.

One of the U.S. Unified Command Plan changes has implicationsfor the job of Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic, SACLANT.SACLANT heads one of the two existing NATO strategic com-mands. Today, the commander of the U.S. Joint Forces Commandserves as SACLANT.

The new U.S. Unified Command Plan, however, is going torefocus the U.S. Joint Forces Command solely on its transformationmission. Secretary Rumsfeld has approved the decision to divestthe commander of the U.S. Joint Forces Command of hisSACLANT responsibilities.

Now, various allied officials have told us that NATO’s connectionto an American four-star combatant commander based in theUnited States is an important transatlantic link for the Alliance.And we are consulting with Lord Robertson, NATO’s Secretary-General, and with the allies on the future arrangements forSACLANT.

We are intent on bolstering, not cutting the transatlantic linksof NATO. And we will do so in ways that serve the common inter-est in promoting defense transformation and streamlining NATO’sCommand Structure.

Now, Mr. Chairman, I would like to offer a word or two on thisissue of new members. The goal of inviting additional European de-mocracies to join the Alliance has been well addressed by SecretaryGrossman, who cited this important statement by President Bushthat, as we plan the Prague summit, ‘‘We should not calculate howlittle we can get away with, but how much we can do to advancethe cause of freedom.’’

Mr. Chairman, I recall that you and Senator Helms and othermembers of this committee wrote to President Bush a few weeksbefore his Warsaw speech stating that, ‘‘It is in America’s strategicinterest that the process of NATO enlargement continue.’’

The events of September 11 have intensified the President’s com-mitment to this goal. The administration wants to preserve a bi-partisan approach as we move forward. An enlarged Alliance ofdemocratic states with improved military capabilities and inter-operability, joint defense and operational planning, and realistictraining will be better able to fulfill the Alliance’s purpose to in-crease the security of its members and provide for their commondefense effort against terrorism and other threats.


25

The aspirant countries are demonstrating their ability to operatewith the Alliance. For example, in the past year, 7 of the 9 NATOaspirants contributed forces to the NATO-led operation in Kosovo;and 8 of the 9 participated in the NATO-led operation in Bosnia.

Aspirants have contributed in various ways to Operation Endur-ing Freedom through intelligence, overflight rights, use of their airbases, offers of personnel to support operations in the region, andpublic and diplomatic support. They have conducted themselves aswe want our allies to act.

Mr. Chairman, we recognize that enlargement of the Alliance isnot an exercise free of risks and difficult judgments. People of expe-rience and wisdom have warned us of the dangers of making theAlliance unwieldy. They do not want the Alliance to dilute its mili-tary capabilities through enlargement, and they are concernedabout NATO’s relations with neighbors.

They want to ensure that any enlargement will strengthenNATO’s ability to perform its defense mission. And they want toensure that the commitment of new members to the Alliance’s prin-ciples and work will be real and enduring. We respect these viewsand share the concerns. Receiving these concerns is one of the use-ful elements of the dialog that the administration has been havingwith the Senate. It is clear that enlargement must be done withcare.

As part of this process, the Defense Department is working withthe aspirants to help them become the best possible candidates. Weare assessing the state of each aspirant’s military structures, itsimplementation of defense reforms, the readiness of its militaryunits dedicated to NATO-led missions, and the military value itcan bring to NATO. We are telling them clearly where improve-ments are necessary.

As to the issue of new relationships and NATO’s relationship inparticular with Russia, President Bush has made a top priority ofcreating a new, cooperative U.S.-Russian relationship. And that ef-fort is integrated with the work that we are doing with the NATOallies to create the NATO-Russia relationship based on specificpractical cooperation. The goal is to erase the vestiges of cold warhostility.

Fostering improved NATO-Russia cooperation can induce furtherdemocratic, market and military reform in Russia and contributeto improving Russia’s relations with its neighbors.

As we move forward, first to the NATO-Russia summit that iscoming at the end of this month, and then beyond, NATO shouldtake, and will take care to retain its ability to decide and act onsecurity issues as its members see fit.

The North Atlantic Council will decide by consensus on the formand substance of our cooperation with Russia. As Secretary Gross-man stressed, Russia will not have a veto over Alliance decisions,and we will ensure that NATO-Russia cooperation does not serveto discourage or marginalize other partners.

Mr. Chairman, in conclusion, we plan to use the Prague summitto improve the Alliance, to make it more capable militarily, betterable to secure the peace and more tightly knit across the Atlantic.

I believe we have strong bipartisan support for this approach. Ilook forward to working with you and the members of this com-


26

mittee as we move forward to the NATO summit in Prague. Thankyou.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Feith follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF HON. DOUGLAS J. FEITH, UNDER SECRETARY OF DEFENSEFOR POLICY

Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee, I appreciate the opportunity to discusswith you NATO’s future in the run-up to the Alliance’s summit meeting in Praguenext November.

The preamble to the 1949 NATO Treaty states:[The Parties] are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage

and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, in-dividual liberty and the rule of law. They seek to promote stability andwell-being in the North Atlantic Area.

NATO achieved these purposes during the Cold War. Since then, it fulfilled themin the Balkans through its peacekeeping work in Bosnia and in the war against eth-nic cleansing in Kosovo. NATO has adapted itself to play an important role sup-porting the current U.S.-led war on terrorism. In the future, an expanding list ofNATO members will continue to promote Euro-Atlantic stability. The Alliance willcontinue to safeguard the community of North Atlantic democracies against threatsof all types, including, I suppose, threats we cannot now even anticipate.

Since 1949, broad, bipartisan support for NATO has been an element of U.S. na-tional security policy. This is a sign that the phrase ‘‘Atlantic community’’ is mean-ingful. The United States and its European and Canadian Allies indeed constitutea community. We are not just a collection of members of a multinational forum. Weshare fundamental beliefs—for example, about the nature of human beings, theirrights and their relationship to their respective governments. And the security ofthe community’s different elements is of a piece. Among the Atlantic community’smembers, there are large common interests—economic and political as well as mili-tary—and there is true fellow feeling that motivates action. For an alliance of thiskind to remain vital for over fifty years, there must be more than a treaty under-lying it. There must be sentiment—a sense of community—that makes the Alliancericher than a simple legal obligation.

This point, I think, was illustrated in the immediate aftermath of the September11 attack on the United States.

NATO and our NATO Allies responded to the attack quickly, loyally and usefully.Less than 24 hours after the World Trade Center and Pentagon were hit, the NATOAlliance, for the first time in history, invoked Article 5—the collective defense provi-sion of the 1949 NATO Treaty. Since last fall, seven NATO Airborne Warning andControl System (AWACS) aircraft have been patrolling U.S. skies. The war effortand the post-Taliban reconstruction and security effort in Afghanistan are bene-fiting from individual NATO Allies’ and Partners’ contributions. Such Allied con-tributions have come within and outside formal NATO structures. All those con-tributions, however, are the result of more than 50 years of joint planning, trainingand operations within NATO.

Those contributions have entailed great sacrifice. America is not the only NATOAlly to have lost soldiers in Operation Enduring Freedom. The forces of our Cana-dian and European Allies also have suffered losses, as have other coalition statesin Operation Enduring Freedom.

In his statement to NATO defense ministers last June, Secretary Rumsfeld listedterrorism first among the new threats facing the Alliance. The others he mentionedwere cyber-attack, high-tech conventional weapons, and ballistic and cruise missilesarmed with weapons of mass destruction.

Members of this Committee also recognize these new threats. As Senator Lugarpointed out in a recent speech:

The terrorist attacks on the United States of last September have graphi-cally demonstrated how vulnerable we are. And when I say ‘‘we’’, I meanthe West in general, including Europe . . . The next attack could just aseasily be in London, Paris, or Berlin as in Washington, Los Angeles or NewYork. And it could involve weapons of mass destruction.

NATO’s core mission remains the collective defense of its members, as stated inArticle 5. But there is room and need for change in how NATO fulfills its responsi-bility to protect the Alliance’s interests and promote its principles. NATO will needto transform itself to handle with new threats and serve its other purposes.


27

NATO’s Prague summit meeting this fall will be an important event. At Prague,the United States will stress three themes: new capabilities, new members, and newrelationships.

NEW CAPABILITIES

NATO’s military forces are the essence of the Alliance’s essential function: com-mon defense. But the notorious ‘‘capabilities gap’’ between the United States and itsEuropean and Canadian Allies continues to grow. If this divergence is not reversed,it will impede the Allies’ ability to operate with U.S. forces in the future and will,ultimately, weaken the Alliance’s political cohesion.

So our first goal at Prague must be to begin to remedy the capabilities deficiencieswithin NATO. We shall work to secure the commitment of Allied leaders to specificmeasures and definite timelines to fix shortfalls in four top-priority areas:

• First: Nuclear, biological, and chemical defenses to protect Allied forces, andmissile defenses to protect Alliance forces, territory, and population centersagainst the range of missile threats.

• Second: Platforms (and support capabilities) to transport Alliance forces rapidlyto wherever they are needed, and to supply them until their mission is com-pleted.

• Third: Communication and information systems that will connect Allianceforces securely before and during combat and peace enforcement operations; and

• Fourth: Modern weapons systems—such as all-weather precision guided muni-tions, jamming systems, and capabilities to suppress enemy air defenses—thatwill enable Allies to make first-tier contributions to combat operations.

To achieve these goals, we believe that Allies should seek both to increase defensespending and to use their resources more effectively by pooling efforts.

At Prague, the United States will also seek agreements to streamline NATO’scommand and force structures. As you know, the United States is changing its ownUnified Command Plan. Likewise, NATO should ensure that its command and forcestructures are reorganized for 21st century missions.

One of the U.S. Unified Command Plan changes has implications for the job ofthe Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic (SACLANT). SACLANT heads one of thetwo existing NATO strategic commands. Today, the Commander of the U.S. JointForces Command serves as SACLANT. The new U.S. Unified Command Plan, how-ever, will refocus the U.S. Joint Forces Command solely on its transformation mis-sion. Secretary Rumsfeld has approved the decision to divest the Commander of theU.S. Joint Forces Command of his SACLANT responsibilities.

Various Allied officials have told us that NATO’s connection to an American four-star Combatant Commander, based in the United States, is an important trans-At-lantic link for the Alliance. We are consulting with Lord Robertson, NATO’s Sec-retary General, and with the Allies on the future arrangements for SACLANT. Weare intent on bolstering, not cutting, the Alliance’s trans-Atlantic links. We shall doso in ways that serve the common interest in promoting defense transformation andstreamlining the NATO Command Structure.

NEW MEMBERS

Our second goal at Prague will be to invite additional European democracies tojoin the Alliance. President Bush declared his policy on NATO enlargement in aspeech last June in Warsaw:

I believe [the President said] in NATO membership for all of Europe’s de-mocracies that seek it and are ready to share the responsibility that NATObrings . . . As we plan the Prague summit, we should not calculate how lit-tle we can get away with, but how much we can do to advance the causeof freedom.

Mr. Chairman, I recall that you, Senator Helms, and other Members of this Com-mittee wrote to President Bush a few weeks before his Warsaw speech, saying:

It is in America’s strategic interest that the process of NATO enlarge-ment continue.

The events of September 11 have intensified the President’s commitment to thisgoal. The administration wants to preserve a bipartisan approach as we move for-ward. An enlarged Alliance of democratic states with improved military capabilitiesand interoperability, joint defense and operational planning, and realistic trainingexercises will be better able to fulfill the Alliance’s purpose to increase the security


28

of its members and provide for their common defense against terrorism and otherthreats.

The aspirant countries are demonstrating their ability to operate with the Alli-ance. For example, in the past year, seven of the nine NATO aspirants contributedforces to the NATO-led operation in Kosovo, and eight of the nine participated inthe NATO-led operation in Bosnia. Aspirants also have contributed in various waysto Operation Enduring Freedom—for example, through intelligence, over-flightrights, use of their air bases, offers of personnel to support operations in the region,and public and diplomatic support. They have conducted themselves as we want ourAllies to act.

Mr. Chairman, we recognize that enlargement of the Alliance is not an exercisefree of risks and difficult judgments. People of experience and wisdom warn of thedangers of making the Alliance unwieldy. They do not want the Alliance to diluteits military capabilities through enlargement and they are concerned about NATO’srelations with neighbors. They want to ensure that any enlargement will strengthenNATO’s ability to perform its defense mission. They want to ensure that the com-mitment of new members to the Alliance’s principles and work will be real and en-during. We respect these views and share the concerns. Enlargement must be donewith care.

As part of this process, the Defense Department is working with the aspirantsthrough bilateral and NATO channels to help them become the best possible can-didates. We are assessing the state of each aspirant’s military structures, its imple-mentation of defense reforms, the readiness of its military units dedicated to NATO-led missions, and the military value it can bring to NATO. We are telling themclearly where improvements are necessary.

NEW RELATIONSHIPS

A third goal for the Prague summit is to strengthen NATO’s relationship withRussia and revitalize its relations with members of NATO’s Partnership for Peace.

President Bush has made a top priority of creating a new, cooperative U.S.-Rus-sian relationship. That effort is integrated with the work we are doing with theNATO Allies to enhance the NATO-Russia relationship based on specific, practicalcooperation. The goal is to erase any vestiges of Cold War hostility. Fostering im-proved NATO-Russia cooperation can induce further democratic, market and mili-tary reform in Russia and contribute to improving Russia’s relations with its neigh-bors. President Bush supported a NATO-Russia summit at the end of this monthas a means to press forward on this path.

As we do so, NATO will take care to retain its ability to decide and act on securityissues as its members see fit. Protecting Alliance solidarity and effectiveness is ofthe utmost importance. The North Atlantic Council will decide, by consensus, on theform and substance of our cooperation with Russia. Russia will not have a veto overAlliance decisions. And we shall ensure that NATO-Russia cooperation does notserve to discourage or marginalize other Partners.

CONCLUSION

Mr. Chairman, we plan to use the Prague summit to improve the Alliance—tomake it more capable militarily, better able to secure the peace and more tightlyknit across the Atlantic. I believe we have strong, bipartisan support for this ap-proach. I look forward to continuing to work with you and all Members of this Com-mittee as we move toward the Prague summit. Thank you.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Secretary.Because we have good attendance and we have a second panel

of two very distinguished Americans, I am going to suggest afterconsultation with Senator Lugar that we limit our rounds to 5 min-utes, even though I am confident we each have a good half houror more worth of questions apiece. But you both have always beenavailable, so we still have you at our disposal.

Let me also point out in our audience today, that I and the staffhave recognized, and we may not have recognized them all, Ambas-sadors to the U.S. from NATO aspirant countries, including Bul-garia.

Would each of the Ambassadors stand up? We have the Bul-garian Ambassador to the United States, the Romanian Ambas-


29

sador to the United States, the Slovenian Ambassador to theUnited States, the Lithuanian Ambassador to the United States,the Estonian Ambassador to the United States, and the LatvianAmbassador to the United States.

The CHAIRMAN. We welcome you all.Thank you very much for your interest and the efforts your coun-

tries are making.Now, let me—you can begin the time for me, Bertie.Let me state at the outset, I think Senator Lugar’s statement

was brilliantly succinct and to the point and laid out in stark reliefwhat the most pressing concern is. We are all talking about thisin three parts, one of which is expansion.

I would argue that the single most significant aspect of expan-sion of NATO is the process itself. The aspirant countries may verywell have engaged in every reform even without the carrot of ad-mission to NATO, but I would suggest that the last threeadmittees, which was significant.

So I think we should not lose sight of the process itself. The proc-ess itself has had an incredibly democratizing impact on Europe asa whole. And if we did nothing else, in my view, that would makeit all worthwhile, even beyond getting to the question, but Sec-retary Feith talked about our shared democratic values. Aside frommeeting the military criteria, all the aspirant countries have todemonstrate that they do share those values, and in particular thatthey have rejected the very ugly remnants of wartime fascism thatmust be totally and permanently suppressed. It is something ofgreat consequence.

I realize this is a difficult time in Europe, and I realize that cir-cumstances in the Middle East and population shifts as well as im-migration in many of the countries that are part of NATO, or areseeking to be part of NATO, have resulted in some real demonstra-tions of anti-Semitism speaking only for this Senator, and I am notmaking any accusations, but I suggest that just speaking for my-self, were I to conclude that any of the aspirant countries, whenpicked, were not doing every single solitary thing in their power todeal with that issue, I would be part of a one-man band to keepthem from becoming part of NATO, whether or not the administra-tion recommended them.

But let me speak to, and I ask permission of my colleague: I askif I can see his statement. I just want to read two sentences fromSenator Lugar’s statement, because it is what I want to focus onin my remaining 3 minutes or so.

He said, ‘‘We have the most successful Alliance ever created, butit is or seems to be marginal or even irrelevant when it comes todealing with the most urgent issues of the day.’’ Continuing thequote, ‘‘And the fact that NATO, ostensibly America’s premiere alli-ance and the linchpin of transatlantic relationship, sometimes ap-pears to be absent in our strategy on these critical issues, raisesimportant questions about NATO’s future, centrality and vitality.’’

I could not agree more with any statement that I have heardabout NATO in the last 10 years.

One of the things I know you know, but I want to emphasize, isthat we are having, ‘‘increasing difficulty,’’ though that may be anexaggeration. I find myself, as a strong proponent of NATO over


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the past 30 years being a United States Senator 29 years, havingto ‘‘make the case’’ for NATO among my colleagues. I have neverhad to ‘‘make the case’’ for NATO before. It was sort of self-evident.But the case is having to be made. And unless there is a growingunderstanding and a resolution of what role NATO plays outsideof Europe, I fear that you may find the very support you both spoketo so eloquently, that you found in the Senate, not there.

And so my question is to you, Secretary Grossman: What is yoursense of our NATO allies’ sense of the need to resolve this issue,the relationship issue? My discussions with our NATO allies haveprimarily been discussions about the relationship issue vis-a-visRussia and vis-a-vis this force that the Europeans are talkingabout, having this ESDP, this European Security and Defense Pol-icy.

I get very little blowback about the larger question which is, inmy view, the central question. So can you give me a sense—nothow high in the agenda—but how concerned and/or interested ourallies are in an enhanced if not an initial, definition, of this newrelationship?

Mr. GROSSMAN. Mr. Chairman, let me try to do exactly that. IfI could, though, first say that I very much agree with your openingcomment that the process itself of having people get ready to beNATO members has been hugely important, both to the three newmembers in 1998 and to the aspirants today.

And may I, also speaking for myself, associate myself with yourcomments about remnants not only of wartime fascism, but I wouldalso say of remnants of communism as well. And I think you areexactly right. We would not come to you with a recommendationthat those countries get a nod from the United States if these areproblems. So I personally associate myself with your remarks.

In terms of the Alliance and what Europeans are thinking aboutus and our commitment to the Alliance, as I said, I was in Europe.I visited with all the allies a couple of Mondays ago. I went to 8different European countries after that to talk about the Praguesummit.

And I will tell you a couple of things. First, most people are verypleased with the three themes that we have got for Prague, and Ithink that is a start.

Second, there is some anxiety in some of the European countriesabout where we are headed with NATO, and whether we believein NATO. And one of my jobs, and I think one of Under SecretaryFeith’s jobs and our Secretary’s job, is to keep making the case, notjust in the United States, but to Europeans, that this Alliance stillmatters.

Part of it, Senator, of course, is not our problem. Part of it istheir problem——

The CHAIRMAN. I agree.Mr. GROSSMAN [continuing]. In the sense that they do not have

the capabilities. It makes them feel bad. They are focused in on theEuropean Union. That is a big project. They wonder where we areheaded. They worry about that.

But what we have got to do, it seems to me, at Prague and beforePrague, is make sure that we are all focused in on the same new


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threats. And that is why Senator Lugar’s speech at NATO, yourcomments, other comments from the committee are so important.

It seems to me that if you can have a terrorist operation that isplanned in Afghanistan, refined in Hamburg, financed in otherplaces in Europe and around the world, and then carried out in theUnited States of America, that what you have got is not an issuehere of out of area, but a return in many ways to the fundamentalsof the 1949 treaty.

I thought what was interesting was you quoted the 1949 treaty,Under Secretary Feith quoted the 1949 treaty, Senator Lugar did,and I quoted President Truman’s speech on the day it came intobeing. In a way, we are not talking about new things for the Alli-ance. We are going back to the old thing about the Alliance, whichwas the defense of——

The CHAIRMAN. But do they sense that? My sense is they are notanxious to talk about that right now. But I have not recently,meaning in the last couple of months, made the tour that you andSenator Lugar, and others have.

Mr. GROSSMAN. Well, I think our European allies are certainlyinterested in talking about capabilities. I also believe that if we dothis right and keep working at it, we will get more and more con-versation going in Europe about weapons of mass destruction.

And I just highlight the point that my colleague made in hispresentation: We have got to focus Europeans on the threat thatthey face from weapons of mass destruction and their delivery sys-tems.

The CHAIRMAN. I am trespassing my own rule, but the only thingthat I got from allies whom I met in Afghanistan, as well as hereis that they are somewhat miffed that once they did invoke Article5, they were not, in fact, embraced and used immediately. And Ifound that to be a diplomatic problem in terms of my discussionswith them. But the——

Mr. GROSSMAN. May I say, I think that that was probably true,with all due respect, kind of September and October. But if you seewhere we are now, with the collective response of NATO, AWACSand ships, and then with the number of allies that are fightingwith us in Enduring Freedom, the number of allies and aspirantsthat are in ISAF, the number of allies that have provided all thesekinds of rights, I mean, it may not be that everything started asfast as everybody wanted. And part of it also is that I think wekind of blew off, a little bit, the NATO AWACS. I mean, people atfirst, said, ‘‘Oh, it’s no big deal.’’

But as you said in your opening statement, it was a big deal. Soas I said, it took time to get some traction, but when you now havecollective and individual responses of allies, I think we are doinga lot better.

The CHAIRMAN. Well, this is the blowback again, and I yield tothe Senator, we are saying that we do not want to be part of ISAF,and they are saying, ‘‘Whoa, wait a minute.’’ But I will go to thatlater. Thank you.

Senator LUGAR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I ask unanimous con-sent that a statement by the committee’s Ranking Member, Sen-ator Helms, be placed at the start of the hearing.

The CHAIRMAN. Without objection.


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Senator LUGAR. I thank the Chair.Secretary Feith, I appreciate your four ideas on capabilities. And

I want to center on the last two; communication and information,weapons or equipment and modern weapon systems.

The Senate has heard, recently, testimony by a young memberof our Special Forces, who was in Afghanistan. He described,among other things, communication gear that allowed him to bringair power over a target that he had designated with special gearand provided its coordinates, he called in the requisite aircraft, andthey destroyed the enemy with a precise hit.

Now, I mention this because without going into more elaboratedetail from a classified briefing, this illustrated for many of us theequipment and communications dilemma of NATO.

For example, NATO countries have special forces; many of themhighly trained, extraordinarily capable, but without the lift capac-ity to get the special forces to the scene, in this case Afghanistan;or the communications equipment and targeting equipment, or fi-nally, the aircraft, they are unable to deploy sophisticated tactics.We had aircraft being deployed to attack targets just as if theywere taxicabs being summoned to the Hart Building. An extraor-dinary way in which a war is being fought, which most of us stillonly barely comprehend, and the American people have really notbeen introduced to it. But this is at the heart of the issue.

Now, how do we work with NATO allies so that they are able toproduce either the equipment to locate the enemy, the communica-tion gear, quite apart from the aircraft with precision munitionsthat have the ability in a humane way, to eliminate the targetwithout civilian casualties or unintended consequences?

Should we create a united fund, in which the United States andvarious European countries collectively provide capital? And do webegin to have production facilities for such equipment in otherNATO countries? Should we share with our allies the extraordinaryexpertise and technical capabilities that underlie this break-through?

Secretary Feith, I ask this question because you have touched ona critical question, but the solution to it, given classification, givenall of the intellectual property issues, quite apart from the securityissues, is really quite profound, even if absolutely necessary, if ev-erybody is to contribute.

I mention this because as I said in my statement, special forceswithout the gear, equipment, aircraft, or the lift capability, are lim-ited to very limited missions.

Can you give any insight as to how you think we might begin tomake headway? I do not ask you for the solution, because I knowyou and the Secretary of State and others are working very ardu-ously in these areas, attempting to think about Prague.

Mr. FEITH. Senator, the attempt, a few years ago, to address thisproblem was the Defense Capabilities Initiative, which, lookingback, we think was not as successful as it might have been, partlybecause it was diffuse. There were so many capabilities cited as de-ficient, that we did not concentrate attention on the highest pri-ority problems.

Senator LUGAR. There were 58, apparently, on the list.


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Mr. FEITH. And one of the ways that we are going about this, ad-dressing this problem now, in the hope that we can actually getsome of these problems fixed, is to narrow our focus to the highestpriority problems. That is why I wanted to emphasize these fourcategories of deficiencies.

Another thought that we have is it is time to set deadlines. Andwe are going to be working with the allies to see if we cannot talkabout performance the ways serious people talk about performance,with real time lines to accomplish different jobs. And we also wantto try to use the summit meeting in Prague to get the highest levelof commitment.

And one of the things we find is, you get a bunch of Defense Min-isters sitting around a table, they are all happy to talk about acommitment to higher defense spending and remedying defi-ciencies. It is not that hard to get Defense Ministers to supportthat. But the Defense Ministers cannot always deliver. And work-ing to get the heads of government committed to these goals, wethink, is an important step, also.

You have raised a number of other ideas, talking about the use-fulness of sharing expertise, technology, and the like. Those arealso good ideas and are, I think, part of the solution to this prob-lem.

And overall, what I think we also need to address is an attitu-dinal problem within the Alliance: the notion that there is some-thing belittling about a country having less than the full range ofmilitary capabilities. Specialization is sometimes considered a dirtyword, but I think it does not make a whole lot of sense that everycountry within the Alliance should have the full range of capabili-ties.

This is sometimes, when this topic is raised, it is the responseof some of our Allies, is America wants to do the high end workand wants to leave, you know, the clean-up, as I think you and thechairman referred to it earlier, leave the cleanup or the less glam-orous tasks to the allies. That is not at all the case. And specializa-tion does not mean that the United States would have a monopolyon the high-end work. We would be delighted if some of our alliescould provide some of the highest-end military capabilities to theAlliance. And we should work toward that. But it does not have tobe the case that every one of our allies has strategic lift capability.

I mean, if we could get some countries specializing in lift andother countries specializing in other aspects, that could be a wayof addressing this deficiencies problem and could help us makesure that our allies are spending smart and not just spendingmore.

Senator LUGAR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.The Senator from Florida, Senator Nelson.Senator NELSON. In his visit to Texas last year, what did Presi-

dent Putin discuss and what did he express about his concerns overthe expansion of NATO next year?

Mr. GROSSMAN. I have to refresh myself, Senator Nelson, aboutthe specific conversations in Texas. What I can tell you is that itis my impression that this was not a main subject of conversation,it was not a subject of controversy; and that for their own reasons,


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I think the Russians have come to realize that the first NATO ex-pansion added to stability in Europe, made better the relationshipbetween Russia and some of the new members, and Russia andNATO; and that President Putin, like many of us, has focused hardon the war on terrorism.

Senator NELSON. Will this be a discussion item when the Presi-dent goes, Memorial Day, to Russia?

Mr. GROSSMAN. I think it would not be a discussion, in the sensewe have to be very careful that we are not asking the Russians forpermission to expand. We are not consulting with the Russians onour expansion. I would be very surprised if the President would nottake the opportunity and perhaps give President Putin a report onwhere things stand in the Alliance.

But I want to be very clear, here, that we would not want to putourselves in a position of even looking like we were asking thatquestion of the Russians.

Senator NELSON. The most recent countries that came in, whathave we learned from their entry? Have their defense budgets metthe expectations? And how about the political and military aspectsof their admittance?

Mr. GROSSMAN. First, I think the answer to your question is,have they met our expectations? And the answer is yes, in myview. I mean, these countries got involved in NATO, and 3 weekslater they were at war in Kosovo. And so, they are living proof thatthey did not join a country club.

They have all contributed in the Balkans. They have all contrib-uted in Afghanistan, both to the larger war and to ISAF.

Have their defense budgets met the standards that we would liketo see? No. Everybody’s defense budgets, with perhaps the excep-tion of the United States, ought to go up. I mean, if you look atthe chart of NATO defense spending, too many of our NATO alliesare under 2 percent. And we need to increase defense spending foreverybody. I would also say that in terms of the politics of the ex-pansion, that worked out extremely well, also.

When the President visited Warsaw last year, one of the thingsthat every single Pole told him was that their relations with Russiahad never been better since they joined the Alliance.

We also saw that there were a lot of internal and intra-controver-sies between those countries that got settled in the weeks runningup and the months running up to their accession.

So, I think the presentation that we made, that they ought tohave become members, the decision that the Senate took to amendthe treaty to make them members, as we look back on it, was theright decision.

If I might say one other thing, Senator Nelson, it is that we havegot a better process this time, which is, I think, that one of thegreat lessons we learned, was to have a Membership Action Planand a Membership Action Program. And we did not have that lasttime.

We made good judgments and it turned out right, but we are bet-ter off, now, having a much better and longer and stricter set ofcriteria.

Senator NELSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.


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Senator Hagel.Senator HAGEL. Mr. Chairman, thank you.Gentlemen, thank you for appearing this morning. We are grate-

ful for your service and your leadership.Secretary Feith, I want to read back one of the points you made

in your testimony. From your prepared statement on page 5, ‘‘Toachieve these goals, we believe that allies should seek both to in-crease defense spending and to use their resources more effectivelyby pooling efforts. At Prague, the United States will also seekagreements to streamline NATO’s command and force structure. Asyou know, the United States is changing its own Unified CommandPlan. Likewise, NATO should ensure that its command and forcestructures are reorganized for 21st century missions.’’

What is happening with that effort? Can you report anyprogress? What’s going on? Is there a panel? Is there a task force?Are we leading that, or what is actually tangibly occurring to ad-dress these issues, especially in light of what both of you havementioned this morning, as has been mentioned by my colleagues,the wide and widening gap of capability? So, where are we?

Mr. FEITH. Senator, there is work underway; analysis of how theNATO command structure can be modified and simplified. Thereare studies that we have been working on within the Pentagon. Weare talking with the allies about them. There is a general sensethat NATO is a little top-heavy. And there are ways of flatteningthe organization and rationalizing it, that will eliminate a lot ofwasteful bureaucracy. And we have begun the consultation processwith the allies. It is going to intensify in the defense ministerialmeetings that are coming up in a few weeks.

Senator HAGEL. So, we are at the study phase.Mr. FEITH. Well, we have done studies. We are actually in the

phase of engaging our allies in talking about specific changes thatwe are going to be proposing.

Senator HAGEL. To actually have NATO do what the UnitedStates is doing, and some of the recent decisions that we havemade, in fact, are changing some of Unified Commandstructure——

Mr. FEITH. Yes, sir.Senator HAGEL [continuing]. Would you anticipate that we are a

year away from NATO command structure changes, or what wouldyou put as a time line?

Mr. FEITH. I do not have that schedule in mind. I know thatthere is a schedule. I just happen not to have it in my head.

Senator HAGEL. When we are talking about that universe ofchange command, address the challenges of the 21st century, whichwe have heard much about today, which you both live with daily,the widening gap of capability and all of the consequences that flowfrom that. Then, in addition to that, we are talking about, mostlikely, inviting new members in NATO.

I happen to be one, as you both know, who thinks it is a goodidea to do that. So, my question should not be interpreted as slight-ing off that position I have had since I have been in the Senate.

But is there some inconsistency here? As you have noted, Sec-retary Feith, you say, ‘‘Our first goal at Prague must be to beginto remedy the capabilities deficiencies within NATO,’’ what we are


36

talking about, but yet we are going to load NATO up with moremembers.

Is that a complicating factor to what we are trying to accomplishhere: to reinstitute a more capable organization to deal with thenew complexities of the challenges of this new century? Is it con-tradictory? Or maybe you could give me an answer to that.

Mr. FEITH. Senator, I do not believe it is contradictory. The Alli-ance is a complex organism. And we need to do more than onething at a time within it. Addressing the capabilities problem, Ithink, we all agree, everybody who has spoken on the subject thismorning agrees, is the top priority project for the Alliance.

At the same time, there are other very high priority projects forus, if we are going to preserve the well being, the relevance, thecapabilities of the Alliance, and enhance the security of the Atlan-tic community. And expansion of members is one of those things.

I see no contradiction at all between the effort to expand mem-bers and the effort to enhance the capabilities of the Alliance. If wedo the expansion properly, it will contribute to additional capabili-ties.

We saw, with the last expansion, that NATO had greater capa-bility. The new allies came in and contributed valuably to the oper-ations that Secretary Grossman just cited in the Balkans, in Af-ghanistan. New members have the ability to be not a drag on re-sources, but a revitalizing and valuable contribution to the Alli-ance.

Senator HAGEL. Thank you.The CHAIRMAN. Senator Smith.Senator SMITH. Thank you.Gentlemen, you have both said that invoking Article 5 was an

important thing and that the NATO allies contributed to the waron terrorism, but I have heard, also, I think, in your words, somedisappointment in the gap between what different members can doand what the United States had to do in responding to terrorism.And I have heard recently from high-ranking Foreign Ministers inEurope that they are deeply disappointed in the way the UnitedStates responded to the invocation of Article 5 and now believe itwas a mistake to invoke it at all.

And I think we are all saying the same things in, perhaps, slight-ly different ways. Is the gap just so great, now, that it is inevitablethat when action is called for, we have to disregard NATO andsend a message to them that they are just not important in our na-tional security pursuits?

Mr. FEITH. Senator, I do not believe that we have to disregardNATO, and I do not believe that we did disregard NATO.

Senator SMITH. But Secretary Grossman indicated that we couldhave done some things better. What could we have done better?

Mr. FEITH. Well, let me, if I may, having played a role in thisissue, I think that it might be useful to offer you a worms-eye pointof view on this particular subject of how we dealt with the alliesin the days after September 11.

We received, from the allies, an impressive and gratifying, spon-taneous outpouring of offers of support after September 11. Thesecame at a time when the entire United States, not least the Gov-ernment, was stunned by an attack that nobody expected. We were


37

quickly organizing a response. We were organizing a war in a placethat we did not expect to go to war before that. There was an enor-mous amount going on. And pulling together the efforts of thewhole government, working with CENTCOM to develop the warplan, was an enormous challenge. And as you recall, after being at-tacked, we actually went to war within a month, having had noplan for going to war in Afghanistan.

This involved a lot of work, to put it mildly. And while we weredoing that work, we were giving thought to how we could bestmake use of these very generous offers that we got from many al-lies, but it was not the easiest thing in the world to organize thereceipt of those offers, the integration of those forces, into our ownwar effort. It took a little time.

We have since organized for excellent relations down in Tampa,at CENTCOM, where we have liaison officers from numerous coun-tries, from the NATO Alliance and outside. And that system isworking extremely well, now. And I think if you talk to any of theNATO allies or the other coalition members and ask them how thatoperation is going, where General Franks is running this ‘‘coalitionvillage’’ and his people meet daily with the coalition representa-tives down there, they say it is going extremely well.

I cannot say that it went extremely smoothly and well from dayone, because nothing in the government, regarding the war, wentextremely smoothly and brilliantly from day one. It was a hecticand difficult time in the immediate aftermath of the September 11attack.

I think a lot of the comments that you are hearing are actuallyvestiges of the few weeks immediately after September 11. Wehave worked on integrating—I mean, it is hard enough within theU.S. Government to integrate the actions of different combatantcommanders, let alone different countries, in an effort like that—within weeks of the kind of attack that we suffered on September11.

We have managed to do so. We are taking advantage of alliedforces that have been made available to Operation Enduring Free-dom. We are now benefiting from it enormously. I believe the allieshave the opportunity to take a role of significance in the war. Andthey are doing so, and we are grateful for it. And I think they are,as I said, if you were to check with them now, you would find thatthey are quite gratified.

One other point that I would make about this that helps explainsome of the comments, there is an interesting phenomenon amongcoalition partners, and that is a phenomenon that we recognizefrom our own experience within the U.S. Government. Not everypart of every government speaks all that clearly and well and eas-ily to every other part of the government. And one of the thingswe have found is that the liaison officers, the military officers thatare representing coalition partners down in Tampa, are thoroughlywired in with CENTCOM, but there are sometimes problems thatwhat they know and are being told is not necessarily getting backto the Foreign Ministries or the Prime Minister’s office in thosecountries.

And one of the things that we discovered is that to keep our coa-lition partners informed and happy, we have to not only rely on the


38

liaison people down in Tampa, but have direct contacts from Wash-ington with the other offices of their government. Because one ofthe things that they were complaining about, when they said, youknow, ‘‘We, as a coalition partner, we are not being informed,’’ theywere complaining about lacking information that, in fact, their liai-son people had in Florida, but they have their own internal com-munications issues.

So, I think we are doing a whole lot better on that subject now.And I actually think the situation is quite good. But there was asense, in the first weeks of the war, that some of the allies did notfeel that they were being responded to as quickly as they wouldhave liked.

Senator SMITH. Do you have a comment on that?Mr. GROSSMAN. I do, Senator Smith If you would allow me, I will

just make two short comments—three.One is I agree with Doug. As I tried to say to the chairman, I

think a lot of this is sort of vestige of things from last Septemberand October.

Second, though, a very important point that he makes, withoutthe 50 years of practice and working together that NATO broughtto the 11th of September and afterwards, we would still be tryingto set up all of these arrangements. I mean, as confusing, and per-haps it is not as perfect as it was, without 50 years of practice ofthis, it would never have happened.

And third, I just wanted to pick up on one question that wasimbedded in yours, which is, is this capabilities gap inevitable?And I think the answer to that question is no, but we ought to geton this fast. And the reason I say no is that some of the capabilitiesthat we have been talking about are not mysteries. They are: buymore ships, buy more planes, buy some communications, make sureyou can sustain people once you get them to the fight. This is nota mystery. These are things that you have to spend your money on.

Senator SMITH. Well, gentlemen, I think Senator Lugar has of-fered some ideas. I do not know if they are right or they are wrong,but I think they ought to be seriously considered, because the truthis, if the gap is not closed, then it is going to be irrelevant in howyou fight and defend your nation; NATO is going to become lessrelevant.

I also think we have got to have a more focused purpose. I mean,it used to be the Soviet Union. Today it is weapons of mass de-struction in the hands of terrorists. And that ought to be clearlystated at Prague.

And, Mr. Chairman, if I may have permission to ask one morequestion.

The CHAIRMAN. Sure.Senator SMITH. It will be brief.I am concerned, as we bring in a whole lot of new members, all

of whom I am anxious to see a part of this coalition, that we donot have a mechanism in NATO for, frankly, suspending or expel-ling members that may simply stray away from values that theWestern civilian includes.

As we look at the rise of ultra-rightists or racists or people whowould expel Jews, not return their property, these kind of things,ultimately, as we take in new countries whose democratic tradi-


39

tions are just being born, I think we need to really consider if thereought not to be a mechanism for inclusion in NATO, because if itis not about values, it is not about much.

Mr. GROSSMAN. Thank you, Senator Smith. It is about values.And that is what this is about, because it is about defending val-ues.

I have been giving this question a huge amount of thought. Sen-ator Lugar and I have talked about it on a number of occasions.Here is where I have come to on this question of suspending or put-ting in a mechanism to kick people out of the Alliance. One, wehave got a lot better process now, it seems to me, for bringing peo-ple in. As I tried to say to Senator Nelson, I think the MAP processgives us a much better feel for who it is that we are taking in,what their challenges are, what their opportunities are.

Two, that we have made utterly and totally explicit the fact thatvalues and democracy and long-term commitment to democracymatter, and you are not getting in the door unless there is a com-mitment to democracy.

But third, and here is the part I am debating, is if you have aprocess for suspending people or kicking people out, what I worryabout is then it drives people to the bottom. Everybody is tryingto meet those minimum standards. How do I keep here?

Whereas, with the NATO treaty and NATO being an Alliance ofvalues, we ought to be making sure that people meet the higheststandard. And I have to tell you that the only way I can figure outto keep people meeting the highest standards, is to keep them in,and not figure out a way to kick them out. And this is a conversa-tion we are going to have to have lots more, because that is nota complete answer, but it is where I have come to at the moment.

I did a little research over the last few weeks, and if you lookback at some of the things that were said about Greece and Tur-key, for example, in 1951, when they became members of the Alli-ance, ‘‘Oh,’’ people said, ‘‘it is too far away. They cannot possiblymanage the Alliance. They are not really like us in culture or tradi-tion.’’ And I think the fact that Greece and Turkey have been inthe Alliance for 50 years has been a good thing for them and hasraised their standards, rather than lowered them.

So, I do not want to rush to the bottom. And my worry is, giventhe way bureaucracies and human beings work, as soon as you setthat lower standard, that is where everybody is going to head.

The CHAIRMAN. Senator Allen.Senator ALLEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for hold-

ing this hearing. It is very instructive. And I very much appreciateyour remarks and those of Senator Lugar, and I associate myselfwith them. I thank Secretary Feith and Secretary Grossman foryour comments.

Secretary Grossman, your remarks about how historic and appro-priate it is that this meeting is in Prague in October of this year,it struck me, as well, while I was Governor, we were on a trademission, and Westvaco had made an investment, it is a Virginiacompany, an investment in the Czech Republic. We were going intoa building to try to get the Czechs to get an agreement with theSlovaks, so, thereby, Westvaco could get the export from the CzechRepublic into Poland, but Poland wanted that deal with the Slo-


40

vaks, which also helped out the mill in Covington, Virginia, and so,showing all of these deals being done.

And we go into this building, which was, it was maybe about an80-year-old building. It was an old bank. And this was where theCzech Ministry of Commerce and Trade was located. And I walkedin, and you saw a Star of David, with a wreath on it. And I said,‘‘What is this here for?’’

And it was in memory of the killing, murder of many Jews. Andthey said that this was once a bank, before the Nazis took it over.And when the Nazis took it over, this was where the SS head-quarters were. Then, after the Communists took over, that was aCommunist office building.

I was thinking, ‘‘What great progress is being made, that we aretalking about something as simple as paper products being trans-ported.’’

And more and more people, obviously, diverse cultures and peo-ple in Central Europe are now enjoying the sweet taste of the nec-tar of freedom. And this is all very, very positive.

That is why I am a supporter of the enlargement of NATO, andsigned onto this bill, Senate bill 1572, because I think NATO, withall of the problems we are talking about here, has had a positiveimpact. I think it will help bring more peace and stability. And Ialso think it will enhance freedom and advance freedom when ter-rorism remains a constant threat.

I think it is vital, some of the issues were mentioned for expand-ing the NATO Alliance, as to the threat of global terrorism. We seethat this threat is a more multifaceted threat. Yes, military is im-portant; logistics, intelligence. Those sort of efforts are important,as well as there are corridors. I think it also a good signal to thesenations that have battled back from dictatorships and communism.They have made tremendous strides; some in different ways, butstrides, as far as freedom.

Now, these countries also want to, not just taste the sweet nectarof freedom, they also want to be responsible; responsible in secur-ing it for themselves and for their neighbors in Europe, as well asfor this country.

And then, as far as militarily, on the southern region of Europe,with that enlargement approach, that would provide a bridge withthe central part of the Alliance with Greece and Turkey.

There are also a lot of improvements in business, such as, as faras Virginia companies, Phillip-Morris is the second largest U.S. in-vestor in Lithuania; not necessarily for Marlboros, but for KraftFoods there. And they are the No. 1 taxpayer in Latvia. They havebusiness interests in Romania. There are Virginia informationtechnology corporations that have business in Romania. All of thosewho have come to me have had positive remarks and experiencesin Romania.

Now, Secretary Grossman, you have visited these 8, at least 8 ofthe allies in Brussels. And what I would like to know is, as we aregoing forward with this MAP or this, I want to use the right term,the Membership Action Plan, which comes up with an objective cri-teria for membership, requiring military modernization, economic/political reform, and so forth. No. 1, what are the reactions of ourEuropean existing members in NATO? And if you could, share with


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us how various interested countries, such as Lithuania, Slovakia,Slovenia, Romania and other aspirants, are progressing to fulfillthe requirements of the Membership Action Plan.

Mr. GROSSMAN. Thank you very much, Senator Allen.First, I thank you very much for your comments. As I did in my

statement, I just also would like to join you in another pitch for S.1572, for the Freedom Consolidation Act. We would like to see thatpassed in a bipartisan way.

The other thing I would agree with you completely, also, is thatwe need to look at a multifaceted response to terrorism. And oneof the things that we have all looked at, not only in NATO coun-tries, but in aspirant countries, is how they have responded, for ex-ample, to U.N. Security Council 1373, on the financing of ter-rorism, and what they are doing in the intelligence and law en-forcement fields. And, here, I think we have seen a lot of progress,as well.

In terms of views, first, of our allies, in terms of expansion, whatI found on my trip was that there is a consensus forming aroundPresident Bush’s view that we ought to have as robust an enlarge-ment as possible. It ought to be as big as possible. There is nobodyyet, thank goodness, ready to name names. We are way too soon,I think, to name names, because people have a lot more work todo. But I think, generally, when I went around, people felt that abigger rather than a smaller enlargement would be good for all ofthe reasons that you cited.

Second, in terms of what we have found in terms of the aspirantcountries, the aspirant countries are working away on their Mem-bership Action Plan, but every single one of them has more workto do. And that is why we are not ready to name names. Peoplehave more work to do in the military area. As you said, they havemaybe more work to do in the democracy area. People have issuesabout security and the sanctity of NATO documents.

So, there are a whole range of things that are yet to be accom-plished, but Nick Burns, when he was around in all of the aspirantcountries, laid this out pretty clearly; said they had more work todo. And the thing that gratifies us is that every single one of themseems to want to do the work.

Senator ALLEN. Mr. Chairman, if I may followup?The CHAIRMAN. Go right ahead.Senator ALLEN. I guess if you are having this for a school report

card, you just get a final grade. It would be good to know wherethey are.

It is, first, encouraging to hear that our NATO allies in Europeare, as you said, a consensus is forming that it ought to be a largerenlargement, as opposed to a smaller enlargement.

I am not going to pressure you to name names. I could under-stand that. Secretary General Robertson asked not to start backingparticular ones. Do you foresee progress, though, that by October,there will be sufficient action taken, that there would be the evi-dence, the progress, the developments along these requirementlines, that there could be a larger enlargement of NATO?

Mr. GROSSMAN. Yes, sir. I do.Senator ALLEN. Good. Thank you.Thank you, Mr. Chairman.


42

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.Gentlemen, thank you very much for being here. As I said, you

have always been available, and you know we will continue to callon you.

I would like to make one brief comment before I bring the secondpanel up on a slightly different subject; but what triggered mythinking was a comment made by you, Mr. Secretary. And I am notexpecting any of you to comment on this, but that is the coopera-tion of the U.N. on terrorism.

I would like to make the point, I am going to be making a longerspeech on the floor of the Senate about this today, that all of thefuror over ‘‘the massacre in Jenin’’ and the U.N. sending a, wantingto send an investigative team. I know all three of the people thatKofi now is suggesting to send. Two of those people are what youmight call, had less than a sympathetic view toward Israel, thatthey have expressed over years. I tried to get a hold of Kofi, theSecretary-General, to hope that he would expand that team, if wewere going to be a team, so there was more, it was fair.

But, second, I would also point out that it is interesting the Pal-estinians and the Fatah chief now is arguing that it was not a mas-sacre but a victory for the Palestinian people. And I quote from to-day’s Washington Times, which I seldom do, ‘‘Jenin, West Bank.Palestinian officials yesterday put the death toll at 56 in the 2-week Israeli assault on Jenin, dropping claims of a massacre of 500that had sparked demands for U.N. investigation. The official Pal-estinian body count, which is not disproportionate to the 33 Israelisoldiers killed in the incursion, was disclosed by’’—and I am em-barrassed, I cannot pronounce the name of the official—‘‘the direc-tor of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement for the northern WestBank, after a team of four Palestinian-appointed investigators re-ported to him in his Jenin office.’’

So, I think we should have prospected this so-called massacre.And I would note that the United Nations, and I am, as you know,a strong supporter of the United Nations, I think they shoot them-selves in the foot frequently, like this team that was being put to-gether. And I know he’s a great man, Kofi Annan. I have great re-spect for him, but I think it was a serious mistake, the team hepicked.

And the closing comment before you leave, so you hear my com-ments, not to respond though you are welcome to, if you wish—butthe other point is that since the curfew has lifted, there have beenhundreds of international press there. Now, if I want to keep some-thing secret, the first thing I want is the U.N. team in and not re-porters. If I worry about something being reported, the last folksI want are international reporters wandering all over the site. Ifind it fascinating that there were probably hundreds, I do notknow how many international reporters. Every major news outletin the world has sent their ‘‘best’’ to Jenin. I have not seen any re-ports about the stench of bodies coming from the rubble and therest.

So, I hope we, and I know the President has, but I hope we keepin perspective a little bit of what is happening and not jump to con-clusions.


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But, again, as a supporter of the United Nations, I am occasion-ally frustrated by the ineptness in the way in which they proceed,but I did not want to say that in your absence. But I am not askingyou to comment. You are welcome to comment. You are both gooddiplomats, otherwise I will recommend that you not comment.

I thank you both very, very much. And I will call the next panelof witnesses.

Gen. Wesley K. Clark, U.S. Army, retired, former Supreme AlliedCommander of Europe, The Stephens Group, he now represents,but he is representing himself here.

Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, U.S. Army, retired, former Directorof National Security Agency, Yale University and the Hudson Insti-tute.

I welcome you both. And as you know, this committee, and I, inparticular, have an inordinately high regard for both of you. Youare two of the best. I have to say this while folks are moving out;I have said this to both of you before, when I got here as a 29-year-old kid, during the Vietnam war, my image of every general in theUnited States military was someone like that movie—what wasthat movie? Doctor No?

STAFF MEMBER. Dr. Strangelove.The CHAIRMAN. Yes; where there is a general on top of a bomb,

smoking a cigar, riding down on an atom bomb. And I have found,over my career, that the single most informed group of people Ihave come across are you guys with stars and bars on yourepaulets. And we have two of the finest before us today.

And if the room does not clear shortly, I will say more nicethings about you, but really and truly, it is an honor to have youboth here. I know you have gone out of your way to adjust yourschedules to be here.

Why do I not begin in the order in which you were called? Gen-eral Clark, welcome; great to have you back. And we are anxiousto hear from you.

STATEMENT OF GEN. WESLEY K. CLARK, U.S. ARMY (RET.),FORMER SUPREME ALLIED COMMANDER EUROPE; THE STE-PHENS GROUP, WASHINGTON, DC

General CLARK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Senators. Thank youvery much for the opportunity to appear before the committeetoday. I did prepare a statement. I would like to just summarizefrom it if I could.

First, I want to thank you on behalf of all of the men and womenwho have served in the military for your dedicated attention to ourforeign policy needs and especially for your support of NATO. Ithas meant a lot to me personally and to all of us who have servedthere throughout the years.

Of course, as the hearing has acknowledged, there are manyquestions about NATO today including its possible enlargementand its relationship with Russia, its continued role in the Balkans.And each of these is an important question. But the fundamentalquestion is different.

That is a question about NATO’s purpose and whether NATO isgoing to simply become a cold war relic which is usefully main-tained as one channel of communication to our friends in Europe,


44

or whether it is going to serve a vital purpose in facing the ongoingand fundamental challenge to American security that we facetoday, including the threat of international terrorism.

The answer to this important question is not yet resolved, nottoday, not in Washington, not in the administration. Yet on thisanswer hangs the perspective and the basis from which to addressall of the other questions about NATO’s membership, relationships,and the scope of its activities. And the answers to these, in turn,will determine whether NATO has value and even whether it sur-vives as an organization.

When we launched the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in1949, we faced a worldwide challenge and threat, the challenge ofMarxism-Leninism, the threat of the Red army. We knew that theUnited States could not survive if the Continent of Europe were oc-cupied by a power hostile to us, and we fought two world wars toprevent it. We recognized we could not meet the challenges andthreat of the cold war unless our wartime allies recovered and re-sumed their place alongside us.

Now, at that point, we recognized our European allies wereweak, their economies wrecked, their militaries consumed, theirmorale and expectations shattered, but we organized, supportedand led these countries, recognizing their sovereign prerogatives.Consulting repeatedly, we gained the consensus required to meetthe challenges of the day.

NATO was the principal framework for these consultations andfor the exchange of information. It was never a collection of equals,but in fact, it was a collection of a group of equals in law. And weacted on the principle of unanimity and we recognized NATO asthe essential underpinning for our actions.

At the end of the cold war, when some predicted NATO’s demise,urgent problems of instability and conflict in Europe forced NATOreform and evolution. And with the support and encouragementfrom this committee, NATO did evolve and change, and NATO alsoacted, as you all know and supported, helping to enforce a peaceagreement in Bosnia, going to war to halt and reverse ethniccleansing in Kosovo, and subsequently establishing the peace im-plementation force there to provide stability en route to a final sta-tus.

NATO in all of these actions, some completed, some ongoing, hasbeen remarkably successful. Today we are facing another chal-lenge: the resentment, despair, and hatred fueled by extremismand poverty, and the threat of international terrorism. And itshould already be clear that the United States cannot face thischallenge and defeat this threat alone.

We prevailed in the cold war by organizing our friends in Eu-rope. And if we are to prevail today, we are going to need thestrong and full commitment of those same allies.

Now much has been made this morning of the so-called capabili-ties gap. I am very much aware of that gap. I participated in someof the initial work that went into the Defense Capabilities Initia-tive. But to be quite honest, we lack the proper analytical frame-work, and we vastly overstated the requirements, when we aredealing with the forces and capabilities of our European allies. The


45

Alliance was never an organization of equals. We never sought, norshould we seek, mirror images of forces.

We worked in the 1990s to create a new command structure forNATO so that it could operate beyond the NATO area. We call itthe Combined Joint Task Force. We organized it, voted on it, exer-cised it, and we have even funded it. And its equipment is comingon. I have heard no discussion about using this in the most obviousplace, in the peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan where, in fact,it could be very carefully used.

And when we look at the Defense Capabilities Initiatives, it istrue: there were 58 initiatives, and they were overstated. What weneed to do instead is, we need to go back to the fundamentals ofNATO. What is it militarily we expect the Alliance to do today? Iwould submit that it is not to be measured in terms of armies, na-vies, and air forces. Rather it is to be measured in terms of oper-ational tasks.

We know we have to be able to take down enemy air defensesand air defense networks. We have to be able to destroy commandcenters. We have to be able to attack and defeat land forces. Wehave to be able to fight in urban areas to finish the job. And wehave to handle the post-conflict operation. These are five combattasks. They can be performed by any combination of service mem-bers or service members from differing services or differing nations.

We should be using these as a basis for organizing NATO’sforces, not the methods we have been using of the cold war. Andthen, from that basis, we can logically draw the requirements.

And I very much support what former Assistant Secretary Kra-mer gave in terms of sharpening the focus. We need some specialforces with communications, with laser rangefinders, and with thekind of courage and hardiness to get in there up front.

Every nation does not need a B–2. Every nation does not needsatellites. Every nation does not need the long-range unmannedaerial vehicles. We can share this. What we desperately need is anorganizing rationale for our forces and a purpose.

But let me go beyond where this discussion has gone so far. I be-lieve we would be making a classic and egregious mistake if we be-lieve that the allied contribution is measured by the strength andcapabilities of the Armed Forces or even those that they commit toNATO. It is not and cannot be.

Now some have included the nonforce contributions, such asbases, facilities, and access rights. But even this is not enough.Bombs, bullets, and bases alone are not going to be adequate towin the war against terrorism. And in some ways it may be coun-terproductive in facing the broader challenges that the UnitedStates is going to face in the 21st century.

Instead of just looking for additional manpower, ships, and air-craft, we need to focus on the problems of eliminating al-Qaedathrough the exchange of information and sensitive intelligence,through the harmonization of legal and judicial standards and pro-cedures and the coordination of law enforcement activities. Weneed to make the international environment as seamless for ourcounterterrorist efforts as it is seamless to the terrorists them-selves.


46

However, exchanges of information, harmonization, coordinationof activities are extraordinarily difficult. There is no internationalorganization to do this. In fact, even though this is mentioned inthe NATO strategic concept, the United States’ position in the pasthas always been: We would prefer to do this bilaterally.

The problem is that you cannot have effective coordination whenevery different agency of the U.S. Government is working bilat-erally with 10, 15, 20 different governments. Getting this coordina-tion involves compromises in long-standing procedures, changes inlaws, and probably a perceived sacrifice of sovereignty.

Definitions of crime, standards of evidence, requirements for ex-tradition, many other aspects of the overall systems of law enforce-ment and judicial processes must be worked. That is the only waywe are going to ever be able to root out the networks, indict andpunish the perpetrators, and prevent the use of our allies and otherdemocratic states as forward bases and staging grounds for con-tinuing attacks on us.

Beyond simply attacking al-Qaeda and Afghanistan and else-where, we have to ensure we maintain our legitimacy throughoutthe process. And we must concert our work in dealing with condi-tions in failed states wherever poverty and extremism may providethe breeding grounds for future threats.

And all of this is simply more than the United States can do byitself. In fact, U.S. efforts that are perceived as unilateral can setus back in our efforts. We need to work with and through multi-national institutions, taking full advantage of the backing of inter-national law and seeking the deepest possible commitments fromour friends and allies.

The experience of over 40 years suggests that all this work isbest concerted in institutional, rather than ad hoc, relationships.As we heard in a previous panel, military liaison is not enough. Ithas to be imbedded at every level of the government. It has to gofrom the top down.

If we did not have NATO, we would be in the process of invent-ing it or reinventing it today. But I think NATO, if it were properlyutilized, could provide the institutional framework that we need.We did reference terrorism in the 1999 strategic concept. TheNATO machinery is a time-proven consensus engine. It forces na-tions to grasp issues and resolve them in a timely manner.

There has been a lot of discussion about what the real meaningof the Kosovo campaign was. And I have been told by some high-ranking members of the Defense Department and other places thatthey have learned the lessons of Kosovo, and nobody is going to tellus what we can or cannot do. They prefer flexible arrangementsrather than institutional arrangements.

But the simple truth is that it was the consensus engine ofNATO that enabled us to break the will of Slobodan Milosevic andhis Russian backers during the Kosovo campaign. Working with al-lies is always difficult because, when you deal with them as sov-ereign nations, they all have their own sovereign opinions. And yetwhat we found in Kosovo was that the use of NATO was the wayto get the camel into the tent with us. We let them stick their noseinto the tent. They came into it. And when they came to us and


47

said, ‘‘Please, you cannot fail at this or our governments will fall,’’then we knew we had allied support.

The question we have to ask ourselves is: What needs to be doneto ensure today that in capitals in our closest allies, they are treat-ing this problem just as seriously as we are? And what I wouldsuggest is that it needs to be worked through institutional channelsand that NATO is the most important and central institution inthis process. It can give us the vital edge in winning, just as it didduring the cold war.

Can we operate beyond contiguous areas? Yes. Can we surviveif we admit five or seven or more new members? Yes. Can we es-tablish a NATO at 20 relationship with Russia and still remainNATO? Yes, but only if NATO remains a centerpiece of Americansecurity efforts worldwide. Together with our European allies, weare close to 700 million people. We are one-half of the world’s grossdomestic product. We are three of five vetoes on the European Se-curity Council.

These allies in NATO constitute our base. It is not a matter ofcollecting forces. It is a matter of mobilizing our base. With NATOwe can move the world. We can move it successfully. And we canmove it with legitimacy. The alternative, of course, is to play withthe form of NATO, to preserve the myth, as some would say, butto do the real work elsewhere.

If that is to be the American approach, then NATO can be en-larged. It can be altered. It can be showcased. But it will inevitablylose its relevance and vitality. And the greatest impact of that losswill be felt not abroad, but here, for NATO has been our creation,our instrument, and vital to the United States. We need it everybit as much today in the current challenge as we have in the past.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much, General. I think that was

a brilliant statement.[The prepared statement of General Clark follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF GEN. WESLEY K. CLARK, U.S. ARMY (RET.)

Mr. Chairman, Senators, thank you very much for the opportunity to appear be-fore this committee today. I know I speak on behalf of all the men and women whohave served in the military in thanking you for your dedicated attention to our for-eign policy needs and activities, and especially your support of NATO.

There are many questions about NATO today, including its possible enlargement,its relationship with Russia, and its continued role in the Balkans. I believe eachof these is important. But the fundamental question is different. It is about NATO’spurpose, and whether it is simply a Cold War relic which is usefully maintained asone channel of communications to our European friends, or whether it serves a vitalpurpose in facing the ongoing and fundamental challenges to American security, in-cluding the threat of international terrorism.

The answer to this important question is not yet resolved, not today, and not inWashington. Yet on this answer hangs the perspective from which to address ques-tions about NATO’s membership, relationships, and scope of activities. And the an-swers to these will in turn prove NATO’s value and even determine its survival.

When the United States launched the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in1949, the United States and its friends faced a world-wide challenge and threat, thechallenge of Marxism-Leninism and the threat of the Red Army. We knew then thatthe United States could not survive if the continent of Europe were occupied by apower hostile to us—and we had fought two World Wars to prevent it. We also rec-ognized that we could not meet the challenges and threat we were to face in theCold War unless our wartime Allies recovered and resumed their place alongside us.

At the dawn of the Cold War we recognized the weakness of our European Allies,their economies wrecked, their militaries consumed, their morale and expectations


48

shattered amidst the bomb craters and casualties. But we organized, supported, andled these countries, recognized their sovereign prerogatives and consulted repeatedlyto gain the degrees of consensus required to meet the challenges of the day. NATOwas the principal framework for these consultations—never a collection of equals,but nevertheless acting on the principle of unanimity and recognized as essentialunderpinning for American actions and policies.

At the end of the Cold War, when some predicted NATO’s demise, urgent prob-lems of instability and conflict in Europe forced NATO reform and evolution withsupport and encouragement from this Committee. NATO created a new strategicconcept, changed its force structure, revised its plans, created outreach to former en-emies in the partnership for peace, developed new relationships with Russia andUkraine, and brought in three new members. NATO also acted, with strong supportfrom this Committee, helping to enforce the peace agreement in Bosnia, and goingto war to halt and reverse Slobodan Milosevic’s design for ethnic cleansing of theSerb province of Kosovo, an subsequently establishing the peace implementationforce to provide stability en route to a final status determination for that province.NATO in all these actions, some completed, some ongoing, has been remarkably suc-cessful.

Today, the United States is faced with another world-wide challenge—resentment,despair and hatred fueled by extremism and poverty, and the threat of internationalterrorism. And it should already be clear that the United States cannot face thischallenge and defeat this threat alone. We prevailed in the Cold War by organizingand leading our friends in Europe. We brought stability to Europe in the post-ColdWar period in conjunction with allies and partners. And if we are to prevail today,the strong support and full commitment of our Allies will be required.

We would make a classic and egregious mistake if we were to believe that thisAllied contribution is measured by the strength and capabilities of their armedforces. It is not, and cannot be. Some recognize that we must also include non-forcecontributions such as bases, facilities, and access rights in the classic Cold-Warburdensharing type of discussion. But even this is not enough. For bombs, bulletsand bases alone will be inadequate to win a war against terrorism, and may wellbe counterproductive in facing the broader challenges of extremism and poverty.

Instead of just looking for additional manpower, ships and aircraft, we need tofocus now on the problems of eliminating al-Qaeda through the exchange of informa-tion, the harmonization of legal and judicial standards and procedures, and the co-ordination of law enforcement activities. We need to make the international environ-ment as seamless for our counterterrorist efforts must be at least as seamless asthat environment is for the terrorists.

But these exchanges, harmonization and coordination are extraordinarily difficult.They need the strongest possible encouragement, protection, and incentives. Theywill inevitably involve compromises in longstanding procedures, changes in laws,and some perceived sacrifice of sovereignty. Definitions of crimes, standards of evi-dence, requirements for extradition, and many other aspects of the overall systemsof law enforcement and the judiciary must be worked. This is the only way that wewill actually be able to root out the networks, indict and punish the perpetratorsand prevent the use of our Allies and other democratic states as forward bases andstaging areas for continuing attacks on us.

Beyond simply attacking al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and elsewhere with militaryand law enforcement methods, we must also insure that we maintain our ‘‘legit-imacy’’ throughout the process. And we must concert our work in dealing with theconditions in failed states and wherever poverty and extremism may provide breed-ing grounds for future threats, as well as against those states who would acquireand proliferate to terrorists weapons of mass destruction.

All of this is simply more than the United States can do by itself. And, in fact,U.S. efforts which are perceived as ‘‘unilateralist’’ can even set us back. We needto work with and through multinational institutions, taking full advantage of thebacking of international law, and seeking the deepest possible commitments fromour friends and allies. And in Europe we have the strongest possible base, over 350million people, a GDP as large as ur own, and nations whose values most closelyreflect our own.

And the experience of over forty years suggests that all of this work is best con-certed in institutional rather than ad hoc relationships. The methods must be togain commitments, to bind governments, to insure that these issues are so centralto the governments themselves that they cannot afford to fail or neglect them.

NATO could today, if properly utilized, provide the institutional framework for thevast coordination and concerted activities that must be worked between states. Theproblem of international terrorism is in fact referenced in the 1999 Strategic Con-cept. The NATO machinery is a time-proven consensus engine, forcing nations to


49

grasp issues and resolve them in a timely manner. It was this consensus enginewhich enabled us to modernize nuclear forces during the Cold War, and it was thisconsensus engine which broke the will of Slobodan Milosevic and his Russian back-ers during the Kosovo campaign. To be sure, operating the Alliance and employingit for these tasks is arduous work. It certainly was during the Kosovo operation. Butthere is simply no better mechanism available for the task. Today, NATO could becentral to our effort against terrorism, instead of peripheral, and it could today, justas in the Cold War, provide us the vital winning edge.

Can NATO operate beyond it’s contiguous areas? Can it survive if it admits fiveor even seven new members? Can it establish a NATO at twenty relationship withRussia and still ‘‘remain NATO?’’

The answer to these questions is yes, but only if NATO remains a centerpiece ofthe American effort worldwide, if we tend it, consult with, and use it at the heartof operations.

The alternative is to play with the form, to ‘‘preserve the myth,’’ as some wouldsay, but to do the real work elsewhere. If that is to be the American approach, thenNATO can be enlarged, altered, and showcased, but it will inevitably lose its rel-evance and vitality. And the greatest impact of that loss will be felt not abroad buthere, for NATO has been our creation, and our instrument. . . . And we need ittoday as much or more than ever.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would be pleased to answer questions of the Com-mittee.

The CHAIRMAN. General Odom.

STATEMENT OF LT. GEN. WILLIAM E. ODOM, U.S. ARMY (RET.),FORMER DIRECTOR, NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY; YALEUNIVERSITY AND THE HUDSON INSTITUTE, WASHINGTON,DCGeneral ODOM. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is a pleasure to be

back and testifying——The CHAIRMAN. It is nice to have you back, General.General ODOM [continuing]. Before you again. I think it is a ter-

ribly important hearing, as other people have said. I endorse thatenormously, because I have long been a great supporter of NATO.Senator Lugar and I have exchanged many common opinions andviews on the first round of enlargement, and so it is good to be ontothe second round now.

I have written a fairly long statement, which I will not read, butask you to enter into the record.

The CHAIRMAN. Your entire statement will be placed in therecord.

General ODOM. I will just touch on a few points in the name ofshortening time, so you can spend more time for questioning thanlistening to me read.

I did try to draw a historical perspective, because I think it isimportant. It is important to realize, in light of some of the ques-tions about missions that General Clark has raised and that Sen-ator Lugar and others raised, the Alliance did not start out as amilitary alliance. In 1949, Truman stopped all the military plan-ning. Every initiative to put forces in Europe was stopped. It be-came a military alliance only with the outbreak of the Korean war.

Senator Vandenberg was promised we would not put troops thereto get him to sponsor the ratification of the alliance here. The pur-pose of NATO was, in fact, to put a political military authority overour allies in Western Europe so they would not fight each other,so they could cooperate in economic reconstruction. Europe hasnever been able to provide that kind of thing for itself. We gavethem a surrogate. And after the Soviet military challenge became


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central, we were continuing to perform this mission throughout thesubsequent decades.

Today in Eastern Europe it looks very much like 1948. We havea band of states from north to south that do not like each other,have difficulties with each other, have different legacies. It was thedestruction by a hot war as opposed to destruction by cold warCommunist rule that created the differences. But again, NATO’spurpose is bringing them under a supranational political militaryauthority so they can begin to create these values that were em-phasized by Secretary Grossman and others.

So I would just make that point for thinking about NATO’s con-tinuing missions.

The next point I wanted to raise is about countries to admit toNATO. I certainly strongly support 5, 7 if possible. I have questionsabout going further right now. I would like to emphasize a specificreason for admitting the Balkan countries. We do not have reallya good framework for containing an outbreak of general hostilitiesin the Balkans. I think General Clark—I would be interested in hisviews on this, too.

Bosnia and Kosovo were not contiguous to the external bordersof Yugoslavia. Therefore, containing them was easier than it wouldbe if war broke out in Macedonia. You could see the Bulgariansand the Macedonians begin to dispute borders then, the Greeks,the Albanians, and others. Having Romania and Bulgaria in theAlliance gives us at least the building blocks for a larger frame-work. So I would emphasize that.

On the Baltic States, I am for their inclusion, and I will not re-peat my points as to why.

On Russia, I do not think that deserves a lot of time now, be-cause it has been pretty adequately covered. I will just say that Ithink President Putin has come to recognize what I remember dis-cussing with Senator Biden here before the first round of NATOenlargement, that Russia’s interests are served well by prosperityand security in the states between Russia and the central part ofEurope. He does not have the military power or the economicpower to provide either. Only NATO does. Therefore, Russia bene-fits from NATO enlargement.

Now to the missions: I agree with what has been said about newchallenges. I may differ a little bit about how we go about achiev-ing what General Clark wants to achieve, what I have heard yousay, Senator Lugar, and others. Senator Brownback also empha-sized this.

If we have a big open debate about this in NATO, it will end upwith a lot of hot air and no real results. I have gone back andlooked at some of the arguments in the 1950s and 1960s. And itis instructive. We have always had these debates. We have neverachieved a consensus throughout the whole Alliance, period. It hasbeen constantly a struggle to keep the Alliance behind simple poli-cies.

I picked up Kissinger’s old book, ‘‘The Troubled Partnership,’’1965. And, you know, it is deja vu. You would think we were rightback to the arguments of that time. I am sure we could have hada hearing like this, we would have wrung our hands about the fu-ture of the Alliance.


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So I have a more optimistic view about where we can go withouta debate on NATO mission. But I do share the views, some of thepoints, that General Clark expressed, on institutional arrange-ments. It is my impression, as an outside observer, that the num-ber of big NATO exercises, like Reforger were dropped in the1990s. We also reduced troop levels rather dramatically.

If we want to run those kinds of training programs to maintainintegrability standards, helping close the military capabilities gaps,I am not sure we have the capability to do so. Rather than talkingabout the new mission, he suggests, choosing skillfully exercises ofthe kind General Clark talked about with his strategic reserveforce is a more promising way to bring NATO to accept it.

I mentioned in my testimony what may sound outlandish to somepeople, that the United States should take the initiative and runan exercise in place of a Reforger which picks up two divisions,moves them to Europe in 2 weeks, and force the Defense Depart-ment to begin to build the capabilities that would be required. Theywill realize that two divisions cannot get to urope in 2 weeks un-less we quadruple the number of C–17s, which the Defense Depart-ment realizes it needs more of, as a result of the stretch to Afghan-istan.

I would then reverse the exercise and let the Europeans moveheavy forces the same way to North America. If you started doingthose kinds of things, you will end up creating a lot of the coordina-tion, overcoming many of the gap capabilities that you discussedearlier and have been concerned about. I think we will never geteverybody up to speed on NATO, but we will get a coalition of thewilling that will come along. And then, if those capabilities are suf-ficiently exercised, when we have a particular problem, like Af-ghanistan, we will have to work the politics inside the Alliance,generating the consensus to do such an out-of-area kind of oper-ation. But we will already have had the operation details for howto do it worked out.

I am not so sure that you will get the kind of interagency coordi-nation General Clark wants through nonmilitary departments ei-ther here in the United States or among the allies. That seems tome to be a big stretch. Maybe that is something to look at waydown the road. But right now, a lot of the capabilities issues anda lot of the debate about the future of NATO can be best dealt withby very vigorous program of military activities or the kind NATOonce had but we dropped out of and have just not committed theresources to continue.

That is the main point I would emphasize there. And let me justend on that point.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much.[The prepared statement of Lt. General Odom follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF LT. GEN. WILLIAM E. ODOM, U.S. ARMY (RET.)

Good morning Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. It is an honor toappear before you to discuss the wisdom of NATO enlargement. I would like to ad-dress four topics concerning this important issue: (1) historical perspective on con-temporary challenges in absorbing more countries into the alliance; (2) how muchto enlarge and why; (3) the Russia factor; and (4) NATO challenges.


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HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Let me begin by offering some historical perspective. Europe’s security needstoday are similar to those of the period right after World War II. The end of theCold War, like the end of that war, left a band of weak European states from theBaltic Sea to the Mediterranean, more connected by wars and ethnic conificts thanby cooperative relations, mutually suspicious, and uncertain about how to pursuepostwar reconstruction. The debates in Europe about creating NATO at that timeignored the Soviet military threat while focusing more on economic reconstructionand fear of Germany. Even the United States saw the Soviet threat as more politicalthan military until the outbreak of the war in Korea in 1950. The initial purposeof the alliance, therefore, was not to ‘‘keep the Russians out,’’ but ‘‘to keep old en-emies in Western Europe from drifting back toward war’’ while proceeding with eco-nomic recovery.

Reconstruction in Western Europe, therefore, succeeded dramatically because tra-ditional enemies—France and Germany—cooperated in the European Coal and SteelCommunity which was soon eclipsed by the European Economic Commission, basedon the 1957 Treaty of Rome. This story is well known, but we tend to forget thatit was only possible because the United States took a hegemonic role in the NorthAtlantic Alliance and maintained large military forces in Europe. This effectivelymade NATO a surrogate for a supranational political-military authority that couldkeep the peace, something modern Europe has never been able to do. Although theensuing five decades have produced the European Union, this organization is a longway from being able to assume the governing role that NATO has played.

CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS

Today’s parallels to 1949 are striking when we consider Eastern Europe. Again,we see a band of states from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean in economic dis-tress, mistrustful of their neighbors because of nationalism and ethnic tensions, anduncertain about how to proceed. Their problems, however, differ somewhat fromthose faced by Western Europe in the 1940s and 50s. Rather than the destructionin war suffered by Western Europe, they confront a different kind of destruction,namely, the devastating legacies from Communist party rule, command economicsystems, and Soviet hegemony. Let me describe each briefly.

Communist party rule. The Soviet regime-type had as its core a single dictatorialparty tightly embracing the secret police and military officer corps. The post-com-munist leaders in these states mostly come from these old organizations, which so-cialized them in ways that are inimical to liberal democracy and market economies.Some are able to change sufficiently to play a positive role in the new political andeconomic systems, but many are not. The problem was different in Western Europewhere the Nazi and fascist elites were deposed and destroyed. No Nazi Party wasleft to compete in elections. The old communist elites have not suffered the samefate; they survive in large numbers and lead successor communist parties and com-munist-like parties, actually winning office in a case or two. I am not suggestingthat the communists are likely to re-establish durable communist regimes through-out the region (although Belarus and Moldova have such regimes, Bulgaria had onefor a couple of years). They have neither the public support nor the organizationaldiscipline necessary, but because they play a significant role in the politics of thesecountries, they obstruct and slowdown progress in effective reform.

Command economic systems. The old economic system in all of these countriessquandered capital in unprofitable investments for four decades, making most oftheir industries unviable in a market economy. Perhaps more troublesome are theinstitutional legacies of command economies. Western Europe did not lose its oldlegal and economic institutions, but in Eastern Europe the communists destroyedthem, such as they were; thus they must be rebuilt today. This is a much biggerchallenge than anything faced in Western Europe after 1945.

Soviet hegemony. The effects of Soviet control over these countries were many, butthe residue of a few of them is especially worrisome. A few former party, military,and intelligence officials, now well-placed within the post-communist regimes, stillhave personal connections with their old Russian counterparts. Not only does thisallow Russian intelligence officers to make political trouble in these countries, butit also permits cooperative criminal activities with Russian intelligence and criminalcircles. Western European communist parties after WW II, of course, caused some,but not all, of the same problems we see today in Eastern Europe.

Nationalism and ethnic tensions. Not something attributable to Soviet influence,these problems are most conspicuous in the breakup of Yugoslavia. To presume, ascritics of NATO enlargement have done, that only Yugoslavia is afflicted by themis a dangerous illusion.


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The history of Europe from the Protestant Reformation right up through WW IIis a record of religious, ethnic, and nationalist strife. England’s border with Scotlandsaw continuous war from 900 to 1746 with two brief pauses. No border in the Bal-kans can match that record!

It is frequently said that peace is now permanent in Western Europe, but sucha claim may be premature. European leaders would have laid the foundations forfuture wars in 1990 had not the United States overruled them. Lady MargaretThatcher and President Francois Mitterand struggled to prevent the reunificationof Germany. Suppose they had succeeded. Germany probably would have reunitedanyway, quitting NATO and expelling U.S. troops, being furious at Britain andFrance, and more beholden to Moscow than Washington. That might also have al-lowed the Warsaw Pact to survive. British and French handling of the Bosnian cri-sis in the early 1990s actually contributed to the spread of civil war in Yugoslavia.Unlike in the case of German reunification, the United States did not become in-volved and overrule until much too late.

In Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia provides a picture of what will inexorably occurthere over the next several years without NATO enlargement. The Hungarian mi-norities in Romania, Serbia, and Slovakia, Poles in Lithuania, Belarus, andUkraine, the Roma in several countries, Turks in Bulgaria, and Albanians in Mac-edonia are other potential sources for ethnic strife and wars throughout the region.The Czech government recently used the old Sudeten German issue to sour its rela-tions with Berlin. And Russia’s province of Kaliningrad, part of old East Prussia,is a potential source of many problems.

Why have most of these ‘‘sleeping dogs’’ not barked, or not barked louder? Becauseprospective NATO members do not want to spoil their prospects for admittance.Without that hope, some of their leaders would feel free to exploit these issues fordomestic political purposes.

Anyone who objects to enlarging NATO, therefore, should be obliged to explainhow we are to deal with the plethora of problems that these four legacies have be-queathed Eastern Europe if admitting new members is ruled out. Still, we must facethe question, how much enlargement and how fast?

HOW MUCH TO ENLARGE AND WHY NOW?

The answer to how much is at least five countries, although seven would be bet-ter. Thereafter, a long interval should precede any additional enlargement. The an-swer to ‘‘why now’’ varies.

The Baltic states have been very successful in their political and economic transi-tion programs. Latvia, having the largest Russian minority, faces more difficultiesbut has made impressive progress. Bringing them into NATO will help sustain whatis being accomplished in these countries.

Some observers insist that the Baltic countries are militarily indefensible. Thisjudgment is wrong on two counts, technical and strategic. On the first count, giventhe great lethality of U.S. and NATO forces against the greatly deteriorated Russianmilitary, a local defense is highly feasible in Estonia, the most exposed of the threecountries. On the second count, Berlin was indefensible during the Cold War, butthe strategic context prevented a Soviet attack on it. The same holds for the Balticstates today. If Russia invaded them, it would risk general war with Europe andthe United States. The strategic question, therefore, is the defensibility of Europe,not the Baltic states. Thus the indefensibility objection is a red herring, not to betaken seriously.

Romania and Bulgaria can arguably be given a higher priority than the Balticstates, not because they are better prepared. Far from it. They face large internaldifficulties. Romania, surprisingly, has done more to get ready for NATO member-ship after its disappointment in 1998 than most observers expected. The key reasonfor including both countries now is stability in the Balkans.

Bosnia and Kosovo are terrible problems, but compared to civil war in Macedonia,they could look small. It most likely would lead to the country’s breakup, whichcould bring Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia, and Greece into a conflict there. In otherwords, a general Balkans war could arise from it unless NATO creates a frameworkfor maintaining security in the entire Balkans. Making Romania and BulgariaNATO members is the most obvious way to begin, because it puts NATO astrideall countries there rather than entangled on one side or the other. This probablyexplains why Turkey and Greece are uncharacteristically cooperating to support Ro-manian and Bulgarian admission.

Slovenia and Slovakia might as well be included if these other five countries are.Slovenia is well-prepared, but Slovakia needs to make greater progress.


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THE RUSSIA FACTOR

After the dire warnings about Russian reactions to the first round of NATO en-largement failed to materialize, new ones should not disturb us this time. Russiais now conciliatory toward enlargement, and for very good reasons.

Stability and economic prosperity in the states of Eastern Europe are very muchin Russia’s interest. Civil war and poverty are not. Russia lacks the military powerto prevent the latter and the economic power to provide the former. Only a U.S.-led NATO has both. Several Russian political and economic leaders have come torecognize this, especially Putin, who seems determined to integrate Russia’s econ-omy into the West.

Then why not include Russia in NATO? First, its policies in the CIS andChechnya are incompatible with NATO membership. Second, it is too big and itsproblems too intractable for Putin to achieve broad Russian integration with West-ern economies any time soon. Third, inside NATO Russia would periodically playa spoiling and blocking role that could fatally weaken the alliance. Fourth, theseven states now seeking membership want security against Russia. Russian mem-bership, some of them have warned, would be dangerous for them. We should notunderestimate their fears as an important subjective political factor.

All of these reasons argue strongly against upgrading Russia’s link to NATO be-yond the 1999 ‘‘founding act.’’ Until Moscow uses this connection constructively forseveral years, it would be unwise to allow it greater access to NATO deliberationsand policy discussions.

WHITHER NATO?

Serious questions need to be addressed about where NATO is headed with en-largement. Will it lose its vitality? Is it being diluted so that it amounts to littlemore than OSCE? Does it really have a mission today? Is NATO being displacedby the EU’s moves to take over responsibility for Europe’s security?

Dilution is a danger if more than the seven candidates now being considered areadmitted. That must wait until the present prospective members are successfully in-tegrated into NATO. Experience already gained from the three new members showsthat it takes time. For example, the Czech Republic is creating serious problems,especially with the increasing signs of unpunished criminal activities by high-levelgovernment officials. No doubt, some of the candidates for admission this year willprove troublesome once they become members. Still, dealing with these problems isa major reason for enlargement. If the Czech Republic were outside of NATO, ourleverage for solutions would be less.

At some point, however, troublesome new members could prove more than NATOcan handle. For that reason, the alliance ought to consider amending the treaty toestablish rules and procedures for expelling members that have become a dangerto NATO from within. Alternatively, it needs to review the measures it con-templated in the past when the domestic politics of a member country appeared toendanger the alliance, e.g., Portugal in the early 1970s when it appeared headedtoward a revolution and possibly a communist regime coming to power, and Greecewhen it became a military dictatorship for a time.

The analogy with OSCE is instructive on the dilution issue, not against expan-sion, however, but as a strong reason for not including Russia or increasing its sta-tus in Brussels. The weight of the mature liberal democratic countries in an ex-panded NATO must greatly exceed that of countries still struggling with internaltransformations into liberal regimes with market economies. U.S. hegemony guaran-teed that in the early years of the alliance and still does to considerable degree, butchange in Western Europe added to NATO’s capacity to handle the proposed en-largement today.

NATO’s mission has become a matter of debate. That is unfortunate and to alarge degree the fault of the United States, which seems confused about it. It hasalways been ‘‘missions’’ plural, not singular, and there have always been lingeringdifferences between Europe and the United States over them. If NATO proved high-ly effective for fifty years with these differences, I do not see the need to iron themall out today in a major public debate. It cannot lead to agreement, and that cannotbe good for NATO.

More important, if we consider the traditional NATO missions, it is not at allclear that the United States would be better off if they were changed. It is clear,however, that the United States deserves most of the blame for neglecting two ofits most serious missions. Let me review them.

1. Providing a substitute for a European supranational political-military authority.This oldest and implicit mission remains valid today, and NATO enlargement givesit added importance in the decades ahead. We need to be more conscious of it with-


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out talking more about it. The Europeans know its importance but do not like toadmit it. If the European Union achieved a political federation with an effective cen-tral government, it might well displace NATO, something the United States cannotoppose, not least because Washington was the original sponsor of European integra-tion. The danger today, however, is that we could forget this mission while the Eu-ropeans create unjustified illusions about EU defense capabilities. The combinedmisunderstandings could precipitate a premature U.S. withdrawal from Europe,catalyzing the slow but sure process of growing tensions and instability in Europe.

2. Training for coalition warfare. The coalition that fought the Gulf War againstIraq was greatly facilitated by NATO interoperability standards and practices. Noother organization but NATO provides the development and maintenance of inter-operability essential for effective multilateral coalition warfare. If we did not haveNATO to provide this service, we would have to invent it. In a word, NATO needsno direct enemy to justify its existence. This training mission alone is enough.

The greatest threat to NATO’s future has been U.S. neglect of this mission sincethe end of the Cold War. It requires a yearly set of large-scale exercises involvingmulti-national operations. And those in turn demand a series of smaller scale na-tional level training endeavors to prepare for them. Large-scale NATO ‘‘combined’’exercises have virtually ceased. The militaries of the new NATO members, Poland,Hungary, and the Czech Republic, therefore, have had neither the chance nor thedemand to become involved in such training at more than a very low-level. Theirnational defense staffs are not forced to become operationally involved on more thanvery limited small unit operations. Thus they can drift along with little change fromtheir old communist military practices.

One of the reasons for the huge gap in military capabilities between the UnitedStates and Europe is the lack of a regular and demanding combined exercise pro-gram. If, for example, the United States began an annual exercise, projecting threeto six heavy Army brigades to Europe, almost entirely by airlift (C–17s can carryM–1 tanks), to participate with NATO forces, that would draw them into demandingoperations, showing up their ‘‘gaps’’ and needs for modernization. Their defense min-istries could not easily ignore them.

The Cold War REFORGER exercises accomplished this with the Central Frontscenarios, but the United States had weapons and equipment already deployed inEurope (POMCUS stocks), making the lift requirements relatively small. Today,such exercises should involve lifting ALL of the weapons and equipment in veryshort time periods. A score of fast RO/RO ships and a fleet of 300 C–17s could puttwo U.S. heavy divisions in Europe in two weeks.

On alternate years, heavy brigades of European forces should be projected on thesame high-speed basis for exercises in the United States and Canada. If the UnitedStates offered the lift and invited European militaries to ‘‘play’’ in this game, theirmilitary commanders would likely jump at the opportunity. The professional en-hancements offered and the chance to show their own governments what their realshortfalls are in capabilities for operating with U.S. forces would be powerful incen-tives to European officers. The new NATO member states would scramble to be thefirst to participate.

Two major gains could result from such training. First, it would show up the EU’s‘‘common security and defense policy’’ for what it is—little more than a piece ofpaper. And it would do so without any public comments from U.S. officials, com-ments that infuriate European leaders without changing their behavior.

Second, the technological gap between U.S. and European forces would likely nar-row. Moreover, it does not exist in some areas, something that exercises would forcethe U.S. defense department to acknowledge. And it would be especially helpful formilitary reforms in NATO’s new member states.

3. Out-of-area operations. The Europeans long opposed so-called ‘‘out of area’’ oper-ations. The crisis in Bosnia changed that. As Senator Lugar argued at the time,NATO had to go ‘‘out of area or out of business.’’ The biggest obstacle to NATO’sundertaking the operation in Bosnia was initially Britain, supported by France, butthen the United States itself became a hurdle—ambivalent and unwilling to committroops to the enterprise for the decades-long operation it would obviously become.

When Washington finally became engaged, it did not put NATO fully in chargebut left the United Nations involved as well. The resulting feckless organizationalarrangements have caused much slower progress than could have been achieved.The task was defined as ‘‘peacekeeping,’’ a term given operational meaning by theUnited Nations’ experiences in the 1950s. It should have been defined as trans-forming the political and economic institutions of all the republics of Yugoslavia, i.e.,the task the United States carried out during its occupation of Germany between1945 and 1955. UN ‘‘peacekeeping’’ allows only very specific and limited activities,


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which cannot create the new institutions needed there. Only military occupation andgovernance can.

The Kosovo operation produced much the same kind of ineffective arrangementsfor accomplishing the long-term transformation task, again because the UnitedStates never really took it seriously enough to accept the full scope of the challengeinvolved.

I review this record briefly because it is the backdrop for the occasional proposalsfor turning NATO in an alliance committed to fighting terrorism everywhere. Gain-ing a consensus on a comparatively limited ‘‘out of area’’ operation in the Balkansproved difficult although it deals with a problem within Europe and directly threat-ening Europe’s internal well-being. Moreover, the United States was and remainsthe reluctant participant although its role is critical to success.

To convince all countries in NATO to commit to a vastly larger and more ambig-uous mission, making NATO the vehicle for the war on terrorism, would be infi-nitely more difficult, probably impossible. Because one country’s terrorist can be an-other country’s freedom fighter, the United States could rue the day it signed upto such a mission. We already have this problem with Russia over the war inChechnya where the United States does not consider President Maskhadov’s forcesterrorists although Russia does. Within NATO the problem exists between Turkeyand Europe over Kurdish insurgency groups. The United States has been generallymore aligned with Turkey on this issue than with its European allies.

There will be times that NATO can reach a consensus to act ‘‘out of area,’’ butit will be on a case-by-case basis. And in some cases, the United States itself maybe the spoiler. At the same time, a few NATO countries are likely to be willing toform ‘‘coalitions of the willing,’’ to use Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s felicitous term,in support of military operations far out side of NATO’s region. And the multilateraltraining and interoperability provided by NATO will make those coalitions far moreeffective if the United States has pushed ahead with NATO exercises of the kindsuggested above. If it has neglected that NATO mission, ‘‘out of area operations’’and ‘‘coalitions of the willing’’ will be far less effective.

4. Collective defense, as prescribed by Article 5 of the treaty, remains a core NATOmission, just as it was during the Cold War. It is no longer pressing in the wayit once was, but it still deserves a lot of thought. Enlargement contributes to it.Some out-of-area operations can improve the alliance’s collective defense, e.g., theones in the Balkans do so in the long run by preempting the spread of civil warand instability. Diverse and varied NATO exercises also improve collective defenseif they are properly conceived. In sum, all four foregoing missions contribute in dif-ferent ways to this basic NATO mission.

This brief review should demonstrate why NATO need not worry about new mis-sions. The present puzzlement about them reflects forgetfulness about the alliance’sold missions and especially the constant disagreements about them.

For example, most European countries never took the Soviet military threat asseriously as did the United States. As Henry Kissinger pointed out in his book, ‘‘TheTroubled Partnership’’ (1965), the United States focused on the technical militaryissues at the expense of the larger political consensus issues in the late 1950s andearly 1960s. De Gaulle’s image of Europe’s future clashed with the U.S. image, anddilemmas of managing nuclear weapons employment strategy remained irresolvable.In fact, technical progress was slowly achieved while political consensus on all thebig issues never was reached. Today’s debate over the ‘‘military gap’’ has much incommon with the gaps that troubled the United States in NATO’s early decades.Looking back to how it narrowed them suggests that slogging along with militaryhouse-keeping to overcome the ‘‘military gap’’ today is a better approach than engag-ing in a major political debate over NATO’s purpose.

CONCLUSION

Let me end by applauding this committee’s efforts to put the case for NATO en-largement—pros and cons—before the American public. Admitting new members isnot a step to take lightly. Moreover, if the United States continues to let the alliancedrift without leadership and direction, and if it spends more time condemning theEU’s military planning than improving NATO’s military activities, enlarging NATOwill yield few of the results and possibly contribute to the alliance’s decline.

I strongly favor enlargement this year not only because it serves a broad rangeof interests, including those of Russia, Europe, and the United States, but also be-cause it should force the United States to wake up to most of these long neglectedtasks.


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The CHAIRMAN. Since there are three of us, maybe we can go to7-minute rounds. OK? Actually, the three of us have all worked alot on this. Why not just feel free to interrupt, if you have a follow-on question?

Senator LUGAR. Can I introduce a statement?The CHAIRMAN. Yes.Senator LUGAR. I ask unanimous consent that the statement by

Senator Enzi be entered in the record at the front end of the hear-ing.

The CHAIRMAN. And again, I invite my colleagues, at least on mytime here, to jump in and follow up.

General Clark, you talked about the CJTF in Afghanistan. Itseems to me a pretty interesting and important notion and concept.I mean, you both made a generic point, we do not have to reinventthe wheel. NATO, which is now viewed and discussed only in termsof military and interoperability and procurement and the like, is,it started off something far beyond that, unrelated initially. And Ithink its most significant role in 50 years has been the initial re-sponsibility it had, which was not in effect military.

Now obviously, it played a gigantic role, the dominant role, in theultimate victory over communism. But the initial role still is thereason why, I think, we must remain a European power, why it isso vitally important. To use your phrase, general, it is the platformfor everything else.

But can you expand for me a little bit on how, if you were, if Sen-ator Lugar were President and you were Secretary of State and hesaid, ‘‘OK. Afghanistan, coordination from this point on,’’ how doyou engage the CJTF? How do you deal with that?

General CLARK. Well, the central idea behind the CJTF was tobe able to operate outside the area of the major NATO commandersand to do so by bringing in other non-NATO members. And so youwould form a command structure. You would have a core of it fromthe NATO elements, but you could bring outside players in. Itcould be Chinese, it could be Russians, it could be Pakistanis. Andyou would put them inside that command center.

And so the question is: Can you form a command center and de-ploy it? And does it have the communications it needs to coordi-nate? And then does it take its guidance from the North AtlanticCouncil? And then you would have to, of course, augment theCouncil appropriately.

But all these mechanisms have been talked out for a long time.You could have done it in the case of Afghanistan. You would havesimply said you would want General Franks to be the NATO CJTFcommander. And he would have a carved-out portion for the U.S.special capabilities that are U.S.-only classified capabilities, justlike we did during the Kosovo campaign. You have a U.S.-onlyNATO, if necessary, and so forth, so you protect sensitive nationalinformation. Then you buildup the command center around it.

But the important point is not the military point. It is the polit-ical point. It is the fact that NATO and NATO governments aregoing to have to engage and agree, ‘‘Are we going to bomb here?Are we going to do this?’’

We have to provide them the information. We have to build thecase. And they, in turn, have to accept their responsibilities for act-


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ing on that case, making decisions, and carrying it to their ownpublic.

The CHAIRMAN. Now there is an obvious reason why I asked thequestion, because I, quite frankly, am beginning to wonder whetherit is the military, whether it is the Defense Department and thecivilian leadership, whether it is the administration, or whether itis us in the Congress, or a combination of all.

But I thought we did learn, and you and I have had many con-versations on this, we did learn some important lessons from Bos-nia and Kosovo. I am not at all sure we have learned many lessonsfrom Kosovo to Afghanistan at all. And granted, I only spent 5 dayson the ground in Afghanistan. So I am not going to extrapolatefrom that the universe.

But I have not met anyone that wears a uniform, who is on theground, from colonel to one star, British, German, anyone, Turk—although I did not meet any Turks at the time—who suggests thatthere is any possibility, any real possibility, of achieving the agree-ment masterly reached by the President of the United States inBonn, to put an interim government in place with a mechanism toprovide for the historic way in which Afghanis chose an electedleadership, a Loya Jirga, and an ultimate government 2 yearsdown the road, that was probably a loosely federated democratic re-public, that had a military that was untrained, in training, thatwas multiethnic, that probably by that time would be in the areaof 20,000 moving to 40,000.

I have not found one single person who says you can get fromhere to there without a significant increase in security capabilityand requirements on the ground. I found myself, and I am goingto ask you both to comment on this. I found myself confronted withthe following dilemma. And I will not name the military personnelwearing non-American uniforms with whom I met in the Inter-national Security Force in Kabul, which was, when I was there,about 1,700, working toward 4,800 or 5,000.

Every place I went and every political leader I met from variousNATO countries made the following statement, ‘‘If you want us in,you have to be in.’’

I actually had an interesting meeting; I think we both did. I amabout to say something that I am not positive on, but I think Sen-ator Hagel was at the meeting when Kofi Annan came down.

And Kofi Annan was saying, ‘‘Hey, no blue helmets here. Youguys have to do the hard job’’ which is an unusual thing for a headof the United Nations to say. And Kofi Annan was saying to usthat ‘‘You have to understand, if,’’ in my phrase, if the big dog isnot in the hunt, no one else is going to be in the hunt.

So I do not, basically, I do not care how you guys work it out,but you have to work out something that satisfies the British, theGermans, the Turks, and/or anyone else that CJTF would envisionand I realize that is not the operational organization right now, butyou have to make sure the big dog is on the ground.

If you are there, you may find they are really willing. I found theTurks excited about taking over command until they found out thatwe announced, I would argue prematurely, we wanted no part. Wewere not going to be any part of the International Security Force.


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Then, I thought we were going through a period where that wasjust a way to avoid the political dilemma, which I fully under-stand—I am not being critical—the administration may have aboutnation-building, because of 2, 4, 6, 8 years of beating up the otherteam about nation-building. So I thought it was going to be OK.

Basically, here is the deal, guys: We are staying on the ground,going after al-Qaeda and the Taliban. We will get that job done.It is going to take us awhile, but we are on the ground. We maynot be part of the force, but we are here. Do not worry. And extrac-tion capability resides with us, and we will do it.

But then I found without, again quoting administration officials,very high-ranking administration officials, when I continually raisethe security issue in Afghanistan, say, ‘‘Do not worry.’’ One veryhigh-ranking official said to me, ‘‘Well, it is—do not worry. IzmailKhan has everything under control.’’

I am serious. This is not a joke. I am being very earnest aboutthis. And my response was, ‘‘Well, Izmail Khan. We have alwaysworried about Izmail Khan and the Iranians.’’

One of the things I thought the purpose of an international forcewas was to let this government mature, let this government comeinto being. And the only way that government has any chance—isif you keep the six surrounding countries out of the deal, so theydo not think they are invested in the outcome, et cetera.

So I am thoroughly confused right now. And I am not being face-tious. It seems to me that it is still not too late, although it maybe, that something has to happen here. I am convinced the admin-istration is going to reach the conclusion that with 4,800 troops inKabul, extended 3 months under Turkish leadership, a U.N. man-date evaporating, will increase concern about our longevity in thedeal, because rightly or wrongly—and I am not making any asser-tion—our allies assume the reason we do not want to be there iswe want to amass a significant force to be prepared to go into Iraq.

Therefore and I want to conclude with this—this is a long non-question, but it is the core of what I think one of the problems is.

The case I keep trying to make is: One of the reasons why theEuropeans and the Arab nations are worried about us going afterSaddam is not that they like Saddam. As one prominent Arab lead-er, one of the most prominent Arab leaders in the Arab world said,‘‘Hey, he tried to assassinate me twice. I do not like him.’’ It is thatthey have no doubt we will take him down, but they have greatdoubt as to whether we are going to stick around and help builda stable nation so there is not chaos in the region.

And they now are looking and saying to me, ‘‘Afghanistan, if youare ready to leave Afghanistan before it is secure, what the heckare you going to do’’—and so I have two questions.

One, is my concern, not illegitimate, but out of proportion to howI have described the problem? And two, if it is not, what is ableto be done, based on where we are at the moment?

That is a heck of a question. But, General Clark, we will startwith you and then General Odom.

General CLARK. Well, I think the concern for security in Afghani-stan is well-founded. And I have favored an expansion of the man-date and structure of the ISAF for some time and have said so ona number of occasions. But I understand also the dilemma that the


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administration is in with the overhang of the expectations for mov-ing against Iraq and elsewhere.

And the United States Armed Forces, as two of the commandersstated, are stretched thin, unless you call up the National Guardand Reserves and get very serious about this. It is probably verydifficult for the administration to do that in the absence of knowingwhat they are going to do and making the firm decisions on warplans. But at some point, I think that will come.

In the meantime, what is going on in Afghanistan is a holdingaction. It is a gamble. It is a calculated gamble that you can usethe forces that are there, attack the remnants of al-Qaeda, showstrength around the country, particularly in the eastern part, andintimidate and cow the opposition so that Hamid Karzai will sur-vive, that the Loya Jirga will happen, and there is a chance.

I think there is a chance. But there is one other factor in that,you know, we do have allies that are in there now. The Turks arein there. They are going to put, I think, the latest I heard was1,100 people on the ground. And for some of our allies and friends,participation in ISAF may be a good alternative to participation inU.S. action elsewhere in the region. So there may be some counter-vailing recruiting pull for ISAF, as we go forward with plans else-where.

But in the near term, I think what we have to do is recognizethat the creation of the Afghan National Army is an enterprisefraught with difficulties. And we have to be preparing some kindof a fallback position that, as we begin to phase out the active com-bat operations with the 5,000 to 7,000 troops and airmen that arethere we move toward a more active participation in ISAF, becauseI think in the near term there is no alternative to an enlargementof its mandate and some involvement on the part of the UnitedStates, if active combat operations there decline.

The CHAIRMAN. Let me just—and then I will yield to you, Gen-eral Odom. Well, actually, I will withhold.

General.General ODOM. I think your point is exactly right and should

have been asked early on. It is easy to go in and knock off Saddam.We did not think it was going to be so easy to go in and knock offthe Taliban Government, but it has proved to be easier than we an-ticipated. But the bigger question is what you do next.

I am not sure. I think the dilemma we face now is whether weget into what is called nation-building in Afghanistan and staywith it for 10, 15, 20 years or not, it is an issue we have to face.And if you are going to intervene someplace else, if you are goingto invade Iraq, you certainly are going to take on a nation-buildingmission there. If you do not, then you will create a situation thatis as bad as what you have right now.

You can, of course, make an argument that it is too risky to stayinvolved in Afghanistan and just say, ‘‘We are going to take the cal-culation that political instability is inevitable and get out.’’ And Ido not think we ought to leave our allies trapped there, if we do.

There is another terribly important point about what you saidthat I want to underscore. If you are going to have a common policyfor an occupation, the United States had better have the lion’sshare of the troops on the ground. In Kosovo right now, there are


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6 armies. And they all talk directly to their national governments,so you do not have a common occupation policy.

If the United States had put in 40 to 50 percent of the troops,we could impose a working policy. The model is Germany 1945. Wehad the lion’s share of occupying forces in Germany. Therefore, theBritish and the French coordinated their policies with us. ‘‘Nation-building’’ is now a bad odor, I know, because of Vietnam. But wehave had successful nation-building: Germany, Austria, Italy,South Korea, Japan, other places. So one failure should not putthis whole issue of nation-building in such bad odor.

And I think it has to be brought back. When we make these deci-sions about where to go to war, we have to think about the nextact, what we do after the war.

Let me just end this by commending to you an article that SirMichael Howard wrote a couple years ago in Survival. I think itwas his IISS speech, ‘‘When are wars decisive?’’ Winning the mili-tary victory is only the first criterion, in his view. For the secondvictory has to be so overwhelming, that you destroy the old elitesand make it clear that the outcome cannot be reversed.

Then third, a new elite has to be cultivated that wants to bringthat country into the Western international system. That certainlyis what we ought to be doing in Kosovo and Bosnia.

Whether we should try to do that in Afghanistan is an open andvery debatable question. Whether it could be done in Iraq strikesme as a debatable question.

So that is how seriously I take your point.The CHAIRMAN. Senator Hagel.Senator HAGEL. Mr. Chairman, thank you.I wanted to also thank the two of you for appearing here today

and for your selfless service to this country over many years. Thiscountry has depended on the two of you many times over, and weare grateful for that service. And you continue to each contribute.

And this kind of exchange is important, as you know, because itfurther develops a base of understanding for us and knowledge andappreciation for all the complications here that go into these poli-cies. And people like you can give us that, and we appreciate it.

Following up a bit on where Chairman Biden has taken this: Asyou know, there has been some conversation about the possibilityof peacekeeping troops in the Middle East, if we would get to thatpoint. There has been conversation about the possibility of a NATOforce, should the United States be in that force, if it would cometo that, if we have a peace to guarantee, if both parties would wantus in. All those things have to obviously fit.

I would be very interested in each of your thoughts about thatissue. Take it wherever you like. It is my opinion that we are goingto have to face this question. And it is probably sooner rather thanlater. And I am not advocating that we do that. But I think thereality of what we have before us demands us to think this througha little bit sooner rather than later.

General Clark.General CLARK. Senator, I think it is a critical question. First,

I think that the sequence has to be right. And I think that theright sequence for consideration of introduction of U.S. troops orpeacekeeping troops is a sequence we had in Bosnia from 1995 on.


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That is, get in agreement; then let the cease-fire fall out during theprocess of getting the agreement. And then if there are tasks thathave to be enforced, then you can put in a force so that it has pre-agreed authorities to go with the responsibilities that are given it.

It is absolutely foolhardy and likely to be ineffective, as well asdangerous to the people that are involved, to put a force in withhopes and responsibilities but no authorities from the parties it isengaged with.

This is what happened to UNPROFOR in the early days in Bos-nia. They were responsible for everything. They were authorized todo nothing. And they ended up getting people hurt, lots of peoplehurt, and failing. And the consequences are still being felt fromthat.

So what we learned in the Bosnia mission is: The authorities forthe force have to be greater than its responsibilities. And that iswhat we secured through the agreement.

So I would not want to put a force on the ground until there wasa comprehensive peace agreement, until the tasks of that forcewere clearly laid out. What are they? Are they to search for ter-rorist cells inside Palestinian encampments? Do they have the au-thority to go through every police desk in Gaza, to search tunnels,to go into a cell when people are under interrogation, to view therecords of that interrogation, to search for wire tapping?

I mean, all of those authorities were written into our policeannex in Bosnia, for example. They have not all been implementedwell, but they gave total assurance to the international communitythat we had the authority to do whatever was necessary to main-tain the peace.

And I think that is the precondition for putting any forces in. Ob-viously, in the best of circumstances, I would not want any forcesin there at all, because I think, I would like to see us get a com-prehensive peace agreement out of this that would obviate the re-quirement for enforcement activities. And then we are out of it.

If we do have to put a force in there, and it is a NATO force,it has to include American forces. Our views, our forces are thebona fides of NATO moderation and of NATO perspective in there.We cannot turn responsibility like this over to the European Union,for obvious reasons, nor would they accept it, nor would the Israelisaccept it.

So if we write a peace agreement that requires enforcement, thenwe are going to be involved in it. And we should be endeavoringto write a peace agreement that does not require enforcement, thathas some very clear, openly acknowledged phases and meets theneeds well enough that it can be enforced by the parties who arebenefiting from it, not by us.

Senator HAGEL. Would you keep the possibility on the table, thatif it would require, and all of the pieces were right, as you sug-gested, that that NATO force, obviously with American troops,should be on the table as a discussion?

General CLARK. I would not take it off of the table, because Ithink it is premature to take anything off of the table that couldlead toward a resolution of the problem there.

But here is what is critical about that: Thus far, terrorism hasproved to be an effective weapon in the views of the Palestinian


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Authority. They have used it. Yes, a lot of destruction has beenbrought to bear; but on the other hand, a lot of public heat hascome against Israel. And Israel has basically lost the public rela-tions battle. And so terrorism has not been invalidated as a weap-on. In fact, if anything, it has sort of been confirmed.

We know that any peacekeeping force we put in there is goingto be effective in deterring or enforcing actions on the Israelis and,overtly, on the Palestinians. But to deal with terror, no. Can westop suicide bombers with a NATO mission on the ground? No, wecannot do it. We will be less effective than the Israelis.

So what we have to understand is that we keep this force on thetable, but if we do not get a peace agreement and the full supportof outside powers like Saudi Arabia and Egypt——

Senator HAGEL. Exactly.General CLARK [continuing]. That completely cuts off any pos-

sible resources for Palestinian terror to reemerge, then we arebuilding ourselves a long-term problem.

Senator HAGEL. Thank you.General Odom.General ODOM. I would add to that, that this is a good example

for making the distinction between peacekeeping and nation-build-ing. This is really quite different from what we are doing in Bosniaor Kosovo. It is really quite different that what we will be doingin Afghanistan, if we go down the road you are suggesting.

This is really to presume that there is a settlement, and manyof the things he said, obviously, have to occur before you get to asettlement. If you are going in there to deal with terrorists, I amnot for going in. It seems to me that that is just a hopeless endeav-or.

If you are going to go in that way, you might as well say, ‘‘Well,I am going to go in and occupy both Israel and Palestine and weare going to be the political authority as an occupation force. Wewill operate a military government.’’

But if you can pull off these other things, such as support fromthe outside, and there is a genuine faction in the Palestinians thatseem to accept whatever it is, then I could see putting a force inthere in those conditions. But it strikes me as very unlikely rightnow.

I would end my point by saying it is terribly critical, in my view,to have the Europeans and the Americans both involved. This issuecan end up dividing the United States from Europe, and we do notwant that to happen. That is not to the United States’ advantage.It is not to Europe’s advantage. And I do not think it is to Israel’sadvantage.

So keeping us all together on that issue strikes me as probablythe most critical thing about thinking through the alternatives inthe future.

Senator HAGEL. Thank you.The CHAIRMAN. Can I followup on an aspect of that with both of

you?I will start with you, General Clark. The EU as a force—Mac-

edonia is about to be a handover. There is a ‘‘peace agreement,’’quote/unquote, there. I am, I think it is fair to say, one of the big-gest boosters of NATO and along with some of my colleagues here


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in this committee, and a strong, strong supporter of doing all wecan to get it right in NATO, I do not want to offend our Europeanfriends. But I am very concerned about the ‘‘handoff,’’ quote/un-quote, in Macedonia.

But again, you were on the ground. You are the guy that ran theshow, not the entirety of it, but you are the guy that got us to thepoint where there are not people hiding up in the mountains andtens of thousands of people being killed like the couple hundredthousand people that were killed before we did it the right way inBosnia.

Tell me, just talk to me a minute about the EU taking over thebaton from us, which is scheduled to occur——

STAFF MEMBER. It is not for sure yet.The CHAIRMAN. It is not for sure, but if it is, we are talking

about scheduling, it being something, A, to be decided upon and,B, as a matter of fact, I suspect one of the reasons why Prodi andPatton want to talk to me today at 5 o’clock may have somethingto do with that. Maybe not. But talk to me about that for a minute.

General CLARK. Well, Senator, my view on it would be that thereis, assuming that all generally stays at the same level of discomfortand low-level violence that it is right now in Macedonia, that it willnot make any practical difference whether the EU is running themission or not, because there is close and continuous coordinationbetween the European Union forces on the ground, Europeans, andthe Europeans who are running the force in Kosovo.

The CHAIRMAN. KFOR.General CLARK. Right. The only difference is that the United

States’ voice will be missing in deciding what the missions are inthe force in Macedonia. But we will have a U.S. Ambassador there.The real question is, will the United States still be interested inthe outcome? It is my impression that the whole move to the Euro-pean Union force has been driven by Washington——

The CHAIRMAN. Right.General CLARK [continuing]. Not by the Europeans. And I under-

stand the need to conserve resources. I understand the need towithdraw forces from the Balkans if they are not needed there andso forth. But I think, as General Odom indicated, these are long-term problems.

General ODOM. Yes.The CHAIRMAN. Yes.General CLARK. When you go into an area and you attempt to

rectify it, the military does not do the nation-building. The militaryputs the stability there so that nation-building can take place. Butthat nation-building will not take place without strong leveragefrom outside powers and especially from the United States.

So the European Union does have some leverage, but not much,even though it is economically dominant. The principal leveragewill come from the United States. The question is: If things startto go wrong, will the United States step back in and exert that le-verage, or will it not?

And this is the start of a pattern that is going to, it is going tobe troublesome if it is the start of a pattern in which we go in atthe start, we withdraw, we go somewhere else, because these aredecade-long problems that require persistence. We are going to end


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up destabilizing countries rather than stabilizing them, if all we dois enter and leave and turn the problem over to others less capable.

The CHAIRMAN. I would agree, yes. You are right.General CLARK. So that is the concern.The CHAIRMAN. Especially since, as you talked about in your

statement, that in Prague the organizing rationale and purpose ofNATO is a little bit in flux here. And one of the reasons why Iagree with General Odom’s recommendation about the expansion ofNATO, particularly including some of the Baltic States and Bal-kans, is for that very reason, as part of the stability.

I mean, I am not where I was; I pushed very hard in the firstround for Slovenia, not because I think people in Peoria or in Salis-bury, Maryland or in Seaford, Delaware, were going to rest easi-er—and I do not mean to denigrate Slovenia—rest easier knowingthe Slovenian military is with us, but as a window to the rest ofthe Balkans saying, ‘‘You behave correctly, you can become part ofNATO.’’ One of the two methods of being permanently integratedinto Europe are NATO and the EU. And if we have to go first withNATO, so be it.

And so I am even more inclined to give the benefit of the doubtand a close call to Bulgaria and Romania. And Romania has hadsome, how can I say it, regression. But, so that is the reason whyI think it is important that your recommendation, General, as Iread your statement relative to that area. But do you have a viewon the EU and its role?

General ODOM. Speaking bluntly, I think it will be a disaster toturn it over to the EU. And I do not think it will be a force-heavyrequirement for the United States to play a very significant rolethere. General Clark is much more familiar with the details overthere, but I suspect a battalion reinforced is a big enough capa-bility in that country to deal with these ragtag Albanian dissidentsor any parts of the Macedonian Government forces that mightmake trouble. It is the presence that is so critical.

The CHAIRMAN. Yes.General ODOM. And we will have as much say there as we have

troops. If we do not have troops, we will not have any say.The CHAIRMAN. Right.General ODOM. It will go to pot, and I hate to contemplate how

to get back in effectively.The CHAIRMAN. Last question. And I am sorry to keep you so

long, but having you both before me is a great opportunity, for meanyway, and for us.

And I will end with this: General Clark, you talked about theneed for seamless cooperation and coordination relating to what ev-eryone acknowledges is, in a sense, the greatest concern of the warof the future. And that relates to terrorist activities and it relatesto the breakout, if it occurs, in my words, not yours, of ethnic con-flict in Europe and other places. And I was intrigued by your rais-ing the possibility, because if I understand it correctly, I agree withyou, raising the possibility, I would argue the necessity, of some-how integrating institutionally the elements of the war on terrorwhich we talk about fighting, that are almost as critical as whatwe think of as the military component of that war. And that is: I


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do not know how you actually engage in that war without inte-grating the non-military——

General CLARK. Right.The CHAIRMAN [continuing]. Intelligence components of these

various governments, i.e., the FBI and Scotland Yard. We can godown the list.

I do not know how that will happen absent a successful coordina-tion in what every European leader recognizes is a serious possi-bility, particularly as it relates to the prospect or the possibility, onwhich I have held extensive hearings, including secret hearings, onaccess to weapons of mass destruction, either rudimentarily madenuclear weapons, of fissile material if it is available, radiologicalweapons, biological weapons, chemical weapons.

That is a genuine and legitimate concern that every informed na-tion in the world has, particularly us. No one pretends the desiredoes not exist among the terrorist organizations to gain access tothis.

And so, I agree with your assessment, and I am doing all thatI can to avail myself of all of the information in the hands of ourGovernment, within the domain of the Federal Government, butthere is no effective coordination right now. There is coordinationon an ad hoc basis, but not seamless, you know, cooperation. Andso you talk about the need for there to be an institutional relation-ship.

And I will end with this: It would seem to me that this could be,if we could ever articulate it well enough and sell it without cre-ating more of a bureaucratic drag within NATO than need be, thatthe debate about our failure to participate in the InternationalCriminal Court could, in fact, dissipate a great deal.

One of the reasons why we do not want to be part of the Inter-national Criminal Court, and one of the reasons why the last Presi-dent said there had to be changes for us to be there, and I havesaid there had to be changes, and this administration has flatly, asI understand it, rejected the idea, which I do not—is that we havenot done the things that you have said.

We have not rationalized the rules of the road. And this seemsto me to be a way that is difficult, but, to begin to try to rationalizethe rules of the road, if there were an institutional coordinative ca-pability.

Am I getting the drift of what you are suggesting correctly? Andcan you expand on it a little bit?

General CLARK. Yes, sir, you are. And that is, what I am sug-gesting is that you enhance the use of NATO to deal with problemsof information sharing and judicial and legal reform. Now, in re-ality, every ambassador has an FBI representative or a CIA rep-resentative and they all have somebody who can deal with law andso forth. But NATO does not. And we have always said we wantto deal with these things bilaterally because these agencies in ourown Government like to work on a case-by-case basis. Can we ex-tradite so-and-so? Can we take specific action against a ship, such-and-such, which is registered somewhere carrying this set of partsto this prescribed country?

And the problem with that is that we have so many issues rightnow that we have a, probably a 5- or 10-year backlog in trying to


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work our way through this. We need to jumpstart the program.This is very, very tough stuff.

The European Union is working right now to harmonize some oftheir laws, but that does not let us in the door directly. We areaware of it through our ambassador there and through their am-bassador here, but we need to do more on a day-to-day basis, onan issue-by-issue basis. I think we need an institutional frame-work.

And the NATO framework is as good as any other. Yes, whenyou add more issues, it becomes difficult. And to be very candidwith you, people in government hate NATO issues. The cables arelong; the language is abstract. People are arguing over where thecomma is and where the sentence is. And it is very unpleasant todo that kind of work.

But it just happens to be the kind of work that is necessary tobring agreement forward between countries. And I would verymuch like to see us move toward a broader definition of whatNATO does, not only a geographic extension of its conventional ac-tivities, because the world we are moving into requires a deeperlevel of cooperation between governments. And if we cannot createa multilateral structure that can handle these issues, we are notgoing to be able to be safe in the global environment on which ourprosperity and freedom depend.

The CHAIRMAN. I will never forget sitting around that very largetable with you, a group of U.S. Senators, when you were directingthe operation in Kosovo. I am not reporting any specific conversa-tion, but the issue at the time was, when we Senators marched into sit with you on our fact-finding trip, was whether or not some-one, whoever was picking targets, and that the difficulty that ex-isted was in dealing with sovereign nations who are part of an in-stitutional structure called NATO and conducting a war in Kosovo.

And some of my colleagues, and it surprised me—most of themwere of the World War II generation—some of my colleagues wereinsisting that there had to be in the future the ability to eliminatethat kind of confusion.

And I kept thinking to myself, ‘‘What the hell would General Ei-senhower ever have done if these guys were in the room?’’ I cannotthink of a more difficult task than being in the midst of a life-and-death struggle, having to deal with the personalities and the headsof state of all of the allied countries and deciding on things likewhen and if D–day, where D–day, whether or not to go into—Imean, I—has there ever been a time—you are both military histo-rians, by your backgrounds. Has there ever been a time wherethere has been a collective action of allied countries where therehas not been the needed, difficult and painful process of reachingconsensus?

General CLARK. Well, no, but normally it is handled on an adhominem basis.

The CHAIRMAN. Yes.General ODOM. I would like to offer a dissenting view on this

right now.The CHAIRMAN. I would like to hear it.General ODOM. If you look at Governor Ridge’s problems in

homeland security, you run up against the Constitution and the


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Federal system. Now, you can eliminate his problems by cancelingthe Constitution. Now, you know this very much, sir. You cannoteven get coordination across agencies. There are at least nine agen-cies that deal with the border controls. They are in five depart-ments. And we, I think legitimately, could create a border controldepartment, put those agencies in it, and make some progress.

Consider Europe. Just look at the EU trying to coordinate thesethings seamlessly. It may be a good goal to go for, but I suggestit is a goal like the horizon. You will approach it, and it may behealthy to try to approach it, but you are not going to reach it. Ithink it unrealistic in a policy time horizon of 4 to 8 years.

The CHAIRMAN. Well, that is——General ODOM. If we get off onto a debate of this kind, it will

be more counterproductive than productive, in that you do have todeal with that group of people that are giving you a hard time. AndGeneral Eisenhower did not have an easy time of it either, dealingwith DeGaulle and Churchill and Montgomery and a few othertough guys to get to support one course of action.

The CHAIRMAN. That is kind of my point. I guess what I am try-ing to say here is that we seem to have gotten ourselves into, uphere, not you all, we in the Congress, have gotten in this sort offalse debate, in my view a false debate. And it really comes downto—and I realize this is a philosophic—it seems to get down to, thealternative to the hard slogging you had to do sitting there, andyou got it right. You got it done. The alternative to that hard slog-ging is to go it alone. I mean, I do not know how you do it. I donot know what the in-between is. And given those options, it seemsto me it is an incredibly easy choice, that the very hard slogginghas to take place.

General ODOM. Yes. There are some in-betweens. I said in mystatement that if NATO has no foreign enemy, if it does not declarewar on terrorism, we would still need it because it is the only placewe train for coalition warfare. You need it as a training area.

The CHAIRMAN. I agree.General ODOM. And then if you have these capabilities, you do

not have to go with a NATO flag, but you could go as a coalitionwilling to do other things. I do not mind a NATO flag if NATOwants to go on the operation. But I think we can manage NATOand exercise it in a way that it gives us, de facto, this interoper-ability, as we had in the gulf war.

Let me add one point, having had more than a little experiencewith dealing with the multinational intelligence in NATO. It is bet-ter not handled in NATO. It is——

The CHAIRMAN. It is better what? I am sorry.General ODOM. It is better not handled in NATO. Multinational

intelligence is not intelligence. There are other ways to do this, andif you try to get NATO agreement on them, you run into the sov-ereignty issues. If you leave it to the professionals, it is amazinghow far you can get toward de facto multinational cooperationwithout a problem. Those problems I would want to surface. I sus-pect a lot of the law enforcement cooperation is of the same order.

And until we have our own intelligence structures more in line,particularly the FBI’s with the other intelligence community, we


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are not in any good position whatsoever to begin to interface witha changed or even the contemporary situation in Europe.

General CLARK. I think all of those concerns are valid. The ques-tion is, putting those concerns on the table and looking at what thetask is ahead, how can you succeed? You cannot succeed in thiscampaign with bombs and bullets. You cannot. I mean, you cannotuse bombs and bullets in Germany and France and Italy andSpain. That is where the terrorists are.

Now I was in Germany last weekend, and we finally got, 2 week-ends ago, and we finally got traction with Germany. You knowhow? Because the mosque that was blown up in Tunisia killed, Ithink, 17 Germans, and they finally realized that the terroristthreat was real, and they would actually make changes in law. Somaybe that is going to take some traction.

The CHAIRMAN. Yes.General CLARK. But we do not have our allies engaged on the do-

mestic side in the way we are engaged in this country. And untilthey are, we are not going to resolve this problem. It is a very clearsocial sciences problem. It is: How large and complex a system canyou create before the system fails? We are trying to go to a globalsystem in trade, in communications, and in many, many otherways. And we are at the boundary; we are at the horizon rightnow. Can we push it further? That is the challenge.

The CHAIRMAN. Well, this is tough, hard work. I think you meantto say a synagogue was blown up, not a mosque.

General CLARK. I am sorry. Yes.The CHAIRMAN. Yes.General CLARK. I said——The CHAIRMAN. I think it was a synagogue, not a mosque.General CLARK. Right.The CHAIRMAN. It is not, I mean, it is relevant either way, be-

cause it got the Germans’ attention. Germans were killed and it gotGerman attention.

Well, gentlemen, I think we all agree on one thing, that the hardpart is now beginning. That is not to suggest that the sacrificesmade by our military thus far and the risk we have taken as a Na-tion has not been difficult, but compared to what we have to do tocoordinate this from here on out is really going to get tough.

And because of the accumulated—and I am not being facetious—the accumulated wisdom of men like you and women out there whohave thought a lot about this, we will get through it. But it is goingto be painful. It is going to be a painful ride. And, you know, I donot see any simple solutions here, but I do see solutions. And withyou all, we will get through it, and we will figure it out.

And with that, I thank you both for coming. I apologize for keep-ing you so long, but you have a lot we can learn from you. And weare adjourned.

General CLARK. Thank you.General ODOM. Thank you.[Whereupon, at 1:15 p.m., the committee adjourned, to reconvene

subject to the call of the Chair.]


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RESPONSES TO ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS FOR THE RECORD

RESPONSES OF HON. MARC GROSSMAN, UNDER SECRETARY OF STATE FOR POLITICALAFFAIRS, TO ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD BY SENATORGORDON SMITH

ADMINISTRATION SUPPORT OF THE FREEDOM CONSOLIDATION ACT

Question. I and many of my colleagues are co-sponsors of the Freedom Consolida-tion Act. The bill, which passed the House overwhelmingly last session, support thevision of NATO enlargement articulated by President Bush in his Warsaw speech.Is the administration supportive of this legislation and do you believe that it wouldbe useful in your deliberation with our allies?

Answer. Secretary Rumsfeld and Secretary Powell plan to jointly send letters toSenators Daschle, Lott, Elden, Helms, Levin, and Warner to express the Adminis-tration’s strong support for the Freedom Consolidation Act. A draft of the letter isattached.

The Honorable JOSEPH R. BIDEN, JR., Chairman,Committee on Foreign Relations,United States Senate.

DEAR MR. CHAIRMAN:The Administration strongly supports S. 1572, the Freedom Consolidation Act.

This bill, which reinforces the efforts of European democracies preparing themselvesfor the responsibilities of NATO membership, will enhance U.S. national securityand advance vital American interests in a strengthened and enlarged Alliance.

Speaking in Warsaw last June, President Bush said that ‘‘Yalta did not ratify anatural divide, it divided a living civilization.’’ From the day the Iron Curtain de-scended across Europe, our consistent bipartisan commitment has been to overcomethis division and build a Europe whole, free, and at peace. The 1997 Alliance deci-sion to admit Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic brought us a step closer tothis vision.

Later this year at NATO’s Summit in Prague, we will have an opportunity to takea further historic step: to welcome those of Europe’s democracies, that are ready andable to contribute to Euro-Atlantic security, into the strongest alliance the world hasknown. As the President said in Warsaw, ‘‘As we plan the Prague Summit, weshould not calculate how little we can get away with, but how much we can do toadvance the cause of freedom.’’

We believe that this bill, which builds on previous Congressional acts supportiveof enlargement, would reinforce our nation’s commitment to the achievement of free-dom, peace, and security in Europe. Passage of the Freedom Consolidation Actwould greatly enhance our ability to work with aspirant countries as they prepareto join with NATO and work with us to meet the 21st century’s threats to our com-mon security.

We hope we can count on your support for this bill, and look forward to workingclosely with you in the months ahead as we prepare to make historic decisions atPrague.

Sincerely,Question. Secretary Grossman, you recently traveled to eight NATO capitals in-

cluding Brussels. What is the current atmosphere in Europe regarding enlargement?Does Europe have a sense of what this round of enlargement is all about?

Answer. All of our NATO Allies support further enlargement. A broad consensusis forming behind President Bush’s vision of the most robust round possible, as longas aspirants are ready to assume the responsibilities of membership. In our talks,Allies shared the U.S. view that the events of September 11 highlight the impor-tance of building the broadest, strongest possible Alliance.

Allies have agreed that the question of which countries should be invited to joinNATO should not be addressed until later this fall. They, like us, are continuingto assess aspirant countries’ efforts to meet reform goals through the MembershipAction Plan.

Question. Many of the aspirant countries, if not all, have contributed to KFOR,SFOR, and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, and the phrase that I hearbeing thrown around by these countries is that we are already acting as a ‘‘de facto’’ally. While the United States is greatly appreciative for their assistance, what is theadministration doing to ensure that acting as a ‘‘de facto’’ ally is not a guaranteefor NATO membership?


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Answer. While we welcome the support of the aspirants in the international ef-forts to fight terrorism and stabilize the Balkans, we have made clear that their ef-forts receive no guarantee of either an invitation, nor of any protection that is dueto Allies under Article V of the Washington Treaty.

Question. Have the aspirant countries done enough with regard to property res-titution?

Answer. Both the U.S. Government and prominent NGOs maintain an active dia-logue with all the aspirant countries and with the Jewish communities in each ofthem on restitution issues. In the context of that dialogue, aspirant countries arenot only conducting the necessary historical research, but are also undertaking theframing of laws and responsive measures. For example, Romania has twice extendedthe filing deadline for restitution claims, and other aspirant countries are con-tinuing to evaluate their restitution programs.

We have strongly supported these actions and underlined their importance in thecontext of NATO’s commitments to democracy, the rule of law, tolerance, and plu-ralism. As in countries that are already NATO and EU member states, resolvingthe issues of restitution is a complex undertaking. We have consistently encouragedand built upon the aspirant countries’ political will to resolve outstanding issuesrapidly.

EUROPEAN DEFENSE CAPABILITIES

Question. Addressing the growing capabilities gap between the United States andits NATO allies has been placed on the agenda of the Prague Summit. In your view,what are the costs of this capabilities gap continuing to grow and how can we per-suade our European allies that it is in their interest to put more resources towardtheir defense?

Answer. Current and projected levels of Allied defense spending are a source ofsignificant concern. Allies need to invest more in defense if they intend to field a21st century force. It is estimated that overall European Allied defense spendingwill fall roughly 1 percent from 2001 to 2002. The downward budget trend is un-likely to reverse soon because Allies are dealing with sluggish economies and contin-ued domestic pressure to increase spending on priorities other than defense. More-over, Europe’s fragmented defense industries and investments in outdated forcestructures are two major contributors to their capabilities shortfalls.

To address the capabilities gap, we are encouraging our Allies to concentrate inthe immediate future warfighting requirements in four areas:

• Defense against weapons of mass destruction.• Strategic lift and logistical support.• Communications and information connectivity.• Precision guided munitions, unmanned aerial vehicles, and other combat sys-

tems.Over the next several months, we intend to work closely with our Allies in devel-

oping a new capabilities initiative for the Prague Summit that will produce tangible,significant improvements in these four areas. These needed improvements will pro-vide key military capabilities to the entire range of NATO missions, ensuring strongand relevant contributions to the war on terrorism by NATO.

Question. Slovakia has national elections scheduled in October shortly before thePrague Summit. The party of former Prime Minister Meciar is polling very well. Ibelieve it is the view of Slovakia’s neighbors, NATO allies, and the EU that whenMr. Meciar was in power, the actions of his government fell well below what wewould call upholding Western values. In fact, when he was Prime Minister, theother Visegrad countries would not even meet together with him. How will the ad-ministration view the inclusion of Slovakia into NATO should Mr. Meciar’s HZDSbe part of the governing coalition?

Answer. NATO is not simply a military alliance but is a community of countrieswith shared values. NATO is open to countries that can show an enduring commit-ment to democracy, free markets, and the rule of law, and add to the security ofNATO. In making invitation decisions, the United States and our Allies will takeinto careful consideration the extent to which a country shares NATO’s commitmentto these core values.

Prior to the election of the Dzurinda government in 1998, the former Slovak gov-ernment did not demonstrate a record of commitment to democracy and rule by law.There is no evidence that Meciar or the party leadership have changed. There isalso no reason to believe that Meciar or his party, should they return to power,would share the core values and principles of the other Member States of the NATOAlliance. Almost every European official who has visited me has indicated that the


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return of Meciar or his party to government raises serious concerns about Slovakia’sNATO candidacy.

The current Slovak government has passed a significant number of laws since1998, as well as amending the constitution, in order to guarantee that Slovakia willbe a democratic country that is ruled by law.

We believe that a cornerstone of democracy is informed voter participation. Weencourage all Slovak voters to understand the issues and vote for whomever theybelieve can best lead the Slovak Republic in the future.

RESPONSES OF HON. DOUGLAS J. FEITH, UNDER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE FOR POLICY,TO ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS FOR THE RECORD SUBMITTED BY SENATOR GORDON SMITH

ADMINISTRATION SUPPORT OF THE FREEDOM CONSOLIDATION ACT

Question. I and many of my colleagues are co-sponsors of the Freedom Consolida-tion Act. The bill, which passed the House overwhelmingly last session, support thevision of NATO enlargement articulated by President Bush in his Warsaw speech.Is the administration supportive of this legislation and do you believe that it wouldbe useful in your deliberation with our allies?

Answer. On May 7, Secretary Rumsfeld and Secretary Powell jointly sent lettersto Senators Daschle, Lott, Biden, Helms, Levin, and Warner to express the adminis-tration’s strong support for the Freedom Consolidation Act. The text of the letterjointly sent by Secretary Powell and Secretary Rumsfeld to Senators Daschle, Loft,Biden, Helms, Levin, and Warner is attached.

MAY 7, 2002.The HonorableUnited States Senate.

DEAR SENATOR:The administration strongly supports S. 1572, the Freedom Consolidation Act.

This bill, which reinforces the efforts of European democracies preparing themselvesfor the responsibilities of NATO membership, will enhance U.S. national securityand advance vital American interests in a strengthened and enlarged Alliance.

Speaking in Warsaw last June, President Bush said that ‘‘Yalta did not ratify anatural divide, it divided a living civilization.’’ From the day the Iron Curtain de-scended across Europe, our consistent bipartisan commitment has been to overcomethis division and build a Europe whole, free, and at peace. The 1997 Alliance deci-sion to admit Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic brought us a step closer tothis vision.

Later this year at NATO’s summit in Prague, we will have an opportunity to takea further historic step: to welcome those of Europe’s democracies, that are ready andable to contribute to Euro-Atlantic security, into the strongest Alliance the worldhas known. As the President said in Warsaw, ‘‘As we plan the Prague summit, weshould not calculate how little we can get away with, but how much we can do toadvance the cause of freedom.’’

We believe that this bill, which builds on previous congressional acts supportiveof enlargement, would reinforce our nation’s commitment to the achievement of free-dom, peace, and security in Europe. Passage of the Freedom Consolidation Actwould greatly enhance our ability to work with aspirant countries, as they prepareto join with NATO and work with us to meet the 21st century’s threats to our com-mon security.

We hope we can count on your support for this bill, and look forward to workingclosely with you in the months ahead as we prepare to make historic decisions atPrague.

Sincerely,DONALD H. RUMSFELD,

Secretary of Defense.

COLIN L. POWELL,Secretary of State.

EUROPEAN DEFENSE CAPABILITIES

Question. Addressing the growing capabilities gap between the U.S. and its NATOallies has been placed on the agenda of the Prague summit. In your view, what arethe costs of this capabilities gap continuing to grow and how can we persuade our


73

European allies that it is in their interest to put more resources toward their de-fense?

Answer. Current and projected levels of allied defense spending are a source ofsignificant concern. Allies need to invest more in defense if they intend to field a21st century force. It is estimated that overall European allied defense spending willfall roughly 1 percent from 2001 to 2002. The downward budget trend is unlikelyto reverse soon because allies are dealing with sluggish economies and continueddomestic pressure to increase spending on priorities other than defense. Moreover,Europe’s fragmented defense industries and investments in outdated force struc-tures are two major contributors to their capabilities shortfalls.

To address the capabilities gap, we are encouraging our allies to concentrate inthe immediate future warfighting requirements in four areas:

• Defense against weapons of mass destruction.• Strategic lift and logistical support.• Communications and information connectivity.• Precision guided munitions, unmanned aerial vehicles, and other combat sys-

tems.Over the next several months, we intend to work closely with our allies in devel-

oping a new capabilities initiative for the Prague summit that will produce tangible,significant improvements in these four areas. These needed improvements will pro-vide key military capabilities to the entire range of NATO missions, ensuring strongand relevant contributions to the war on terrorism by NATO.

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